University  of  California  •  Berkeley 

Gift  of 
JAMES  D.  HART 


Mtn  0f  Ctttcrs 

EDITED  BY  JOHN  MOELEY 


HAWTHOKNE 


BY 

HENEY    JAMES,  JR. 


NEW    YORK 
HARPER    &    BROTHERS,   PUBLISHERS 

FRANKLIN     SQUARE 

1880 


Entered  according  to  Act  of  Congress,  in  the  year  1879,  by 

HARPER  &  BROTHERS, 
In  the  Office  of  the  Librarian  of  Congress,  at  Washington. 


ALL  RIGHTS  RESERVED. 


CONTENTS. 


CHAPTEE  I. 

PAGE 
EARLY  YEARS 1 


CHAPTER    II. 
EARLY  MANHOOD 25 

CHAPTER  III. 

EARLY  WRITINGS 51 

CHAPTER  IV. 

BROOK  FARM  AND  CONCORD 74 

CHAPTER  V. 

THE   THREE  AMERICAN  NOVELS       ....  .   102 


viii  CONTENTS. 


CHAPTER  VI. 

PAGE 
ENGLAND  AND  ITALY .    142 


CHAPTER  VII. 

LAST  YEARS 165 


HAWTHORNE. 

CHAPTER  I. 

EARLY     YEARS. 

IT  will  be  necessary,  for  several  reasons,  to  give  this 
short  sketch  the  form  rather  of  a  critical  essay  than  of  a 
biography.  The  data  for  a  life  of  Nathaniel  Hawthorne 
are  the  reverse  of  copious,  and  even  if  they  were  abundant 
they  would  serve  but  in  a  limited  measure  the  purpose  of 
the  biographer.  Hawthorne's  career  was  probably  as  tran 
quil  and  uneventful  a  one  as  ever  fell  to  the  lot  of  a  man 
•of  letters;  it  was  almost  strikingly  deficient  in  incident, 
in  what  may  be  called  the  dramatic  quality.  Few  men  of 
equal  genius  and  of  equal  eminence  can  have  led,  on  the 
whole,  a  simpler  life.  His  six  volumes  of  Note -Books 
illustrate  this  simplicity ;  they  are  a  sort  of  monument  to 
an  unagitated  fortune.  Hawthorne's  career  had  vicissi 
tudes  or  variations ;  it  was  passed,  for  the  most  part,  in  a 
small  and  homogeneous  society,  in  a  provincial,  rural  com 
munity  ;  it  had  few  perceptible  points  of  contact  with 
what  is  called  the  world,  with  public  events,  with  the  man 
ners  of  his  time,  even  with  the  life  of  his  neighbours.  Its 
literary  incidents  are  not  numerous.  He  produced,  in 
1* 


2  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

quantity,  but  little.  His  works  consist  of  four  novels  and 
the  fragment  of  another,  five  volumes  of  short  tales,  a  col 
lection  of  sketches,  and  a  couple  of  story-books  for  chil 
dren.  And  yet  some  account  of  the  man  and  the  writer 
is  well  worth  giving.  Whatever  may  have  been  Haw 
thorne's  private  lot,  he  has  the  importance  of  being  the 
most  beautiful  and  most  eminent  representative  of  a  litera 
ture.  The  importance  of  the  literature  may  be  question 
ed,  but  at  any  rate,  in  the  field  of  letters,  Hawthorne  is 
the  most  valuable  example  of  the  American  genius.  That 
genius  has  not,  as  a  whole,  been  literary ;  but  Hawthorne 
was  on  his  limited  scale  a  master  of  expression.  He  is 
the  writer  to  whom  his  countrymen  most  confidently  point 
when  they  wish  to  make  a  claim  to  have  enriched  the 
mother-tongue,  and,  judging  from  present  appearances,  he 
will  long  occupy  this  honourable  position.  If  there  is 
something  very  fortunate  for  him  in  the  way  that  he  bor 
rows  an  added  relief  from  the  absence  of  competitors  in 
his  own  line,  and  from  the  general  flatness  of  the  literary 
field  that  surrounds  him,  there  is  also,  to  a  spectator,  some 
thing  almost  touching  in  his  situation.  He  was  so  modest 
and  delicate  a  genius  that  we  may  fancy  him  appealing' 
from  the  lonely  honour  of  a  representative  attitude — per 
ceiving  a  painful  incongruity  between  his  imponderable 
literary  baggage  and  the  large  conditions  of  American  life. 
Hawthorne,  on  the  one  side,  is  so  subtle  and  slender  and 
unpretending,  and  the  American  world,  on  the  other,  is  so 
vast  and  various  and  substantial,  that  it  might  seem  to  the 
author  of  The  Scarlet  Letter  and  the  Mosses  from  an  Old 
Manse,  that  we  render  him  a  poor  service  in  contrasting 
his  proportions  with  those  of  a  great  civilization.  But 
our  author  must  accept  the  awkward  as  well  as  the  grace 
ful  side  of  his  fame ;  for  he  has  the  advantage  of  pointing 


i.]  EARLY  YEARS.  3 

a  valuable  moral.  This  moral  is  that  the  flower  of  art 
blooms  only  where  the  soil  is  deep,  that  it  takes  a  great 
deal  of  history  to  produce  a  little  literature,  that  it  needs 
a  complex  social  machinery  to  set  a  writer  in  motion. 
American  civilization  has  hitherto  had  other  things  to  do 
than  to  produce  flowers,  and  before  giving  birth  to  writers 
it  has  wisely  occupied  itself  with  providing  something  for 
them  to  write  about.  Three  or  four  beautiful  talents  of 
trans- Atlantic  growth  are  the  sum  of  what  the  world  usu 
ally  recognises,  and  in  this  modest  nosegay  the  genius  of 
Hawthorne  is  admitted  to  have  the  rarest  and  sweetest 
fragrance. 

His  very  simplicity  has  been  in  his  favour ;  it  has  help 
ed  him  to  appear  complete  and  homogeneous.  To  talk  of 
his  being  national  would  be  to  force  the  note  and  make  a 
mistake  of  proportion ;  but  he  is,  in  spite  of  the  absence 
of  the  realistic  quality,  intensely  and  vividly  local.  Out 
of  the  soil  of  New  England  he  sprang — in  a  crevice  of 
that  immitigable  granite  he  sprouted  and  bloomed.  Half 
of  the  interest  that  he  possesses  for  an  American  reader 
with  any  turn  for  analysis  must  reside  in  his  latent  New 
England  savour ;  and  I  think  it  no  more  than  just  to  say 
that  whatever  entertainment  he  may  yield  to  those  who 
know  him  at  a  distance,  it  is  an  almost  indispensable  con 
dition  of  properly  appreciating  him  to  have  received  a  per 
sonal  impression  of  the  manners,  the  morals,  indeed  of  the 
very  climate,  of  the  great  region  of  which  the  remarkable 
city  of  Boston  is  the  metropolis.  The  cold,  bright  air  of 
New  England  seems  to  blow  through  his  pages,  and  these, 
in  the  opinion  of  many  people,  are  the  medium  in  which 
it  is  most  agreeable  to  make  the  acquaintance  of  that  tonic 
atmosphere.  As  to  whether  it  is  worth  while  to  seek  to 
know  something  of  New  England  in  order  to  extract  a 


4  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

more  intimate  quality  from  The  House  of  Seven  Gables 
and  The  Blithedale  Romance,  I  need  not  pronounce ;  but 
it  is  certain  that  a  considerable  observation  of  the  society 
to  which  these  productions  were  more  directly  addressed 
is  a  capital  preparation  for  enjoying  them.  I  have  alluded 
to  the  absence  in  Hawthorne  of  that  quality  of  realism 
which  is  now  so  much  in  fashion,  an  absence  in  regard  to 
which  there  will  of  course  be  more  to  say ;  and  yet  I  think 
I  arn  not  fanciful  in  saying  that  he  testifies  to  the  senti 
ments  of  the  society  in  which  he  flourished  almost  as  per 
tinently  (proportions  observed)  as  Balzac  and  some  of  his 
descendants — MM.  Flaubert  and  Zola — testify  to  the  man 
ners  and  morals  of  the  French  people.  He  was  not  a  man 
with  a  literary  theory ;  he  was  guiltless  of  a  system,  and 
I  am  not  sure  that  he  had  ever  heard  of  Realism,  this 
remarkable  compound  having  (although  it  was  invented 
some  time  earlier)  come  into  general  use  only  since  his 
death.  He  had  certainly  not  proposed  to  himself  to  give 
an  account  of  the  social  idiosyncrasies  of  his  fellow-citizens, 
for  his  touch  on  such  points  is  always  light  and  vague,  he 
has  none  of  the  apparatus  of  an  historian,  and  his  shadowy 
style  of  portraiture  never  suggests  a  rigid  standard  of  ac 
curacy.  Nevertheless,  he  virtually  offers  the  most  vivid 
reflection  of  New  England  life  that  has  found  its  way  into 
literature.  His  value  in  this  respect  is  not  diminished  by 
the  fact  that  he  has  not  attempted  to  portray  the  usual 
Yankee  of  comedy,  and  that  he  has  been  almost  culpably 
indifferent  to  his  opportunities  for  commemorating  the 
variations  of  colloquial  English  that  may  be  observed  in 
the  New  World.  His  characters  do  not  express  them 
selves  in  the  dialect  of  the  Biglow  Papers — their  language, 
indeed,  is  apt  to  be  too  elegant,  too  delicate.  They  are  not 
portraits  of  actual  types,  and  in  their  phraseology  there  is 


i.]  EARLY  YEARS,  5 

nothing  imitative.  But  none  the  less,  Hawthorne's  work 
savours  thoroughly  of  the  local  soil — it  is  redolent  of  the 
social  system  in  which  he  had  his  being. 

This  could  hardly  fail  to  be  the  case,  when  the  man 
himself  was  so  deeply  rooted  in  the  soil.  Hawthorne 
sprang  from  the  primitive  New  England  stock;  he  had  a 
very  definite  and  conspicuous  pedigree.  He  was  born  at 
Salem,  Massachusetts,  on  the  4th  of  July,  1804,  and  his 
birthday  was  the  great  American  festival,  the  anniver 
sary  of  the  Declaration  of  national  Independence.1  Haw 
thorne  was  in  his  disposition  an  unqualified  and  unflinch 
ing  American ;  he  found  occasion  to  give  us  the  meas 
ure  of  the  fact  during  the  seven  years  that  he  spent  in 
Europe  towards  the  close  of  his  life;  and  this  was  no 
more  than  proper  on  the  part  of  a  man  who  had  enjoyed 
the  honour  of  coming  into  the  world  on  the  day  on  which 
of  all  the  days  in  the  year  the  great  Republic  enjoys  her 
acutest  fit  of  self -consciousness.  Moreover,  a  person  who 
has  been  ushered  into  life  by  the  ringing  of  bells  and  the 
booming  of  cannon  (unless  indeed  he  be  frightened  straight 
out  of  it  again  by  the  uproar  of  his  awakening)  receives 
by  this  very  fact  an  injunction  to  do  something  great, 
something  that  will  justify  such  striking  natal  accompani- 

1  It  is  proper  that  before  I  go  further  I  should  acknowledge  my 
large  obligations  to  the  only  biography  of  our  author,  of  any  consid 
erable  length,  that  has  been  written  —  the  little  volume  entitled  A 
Study  of  Hawthorne,  by  Mr.  George  Parsons  Lathrop,  the  son-in-law 
of  the  subject  of  the  work.  (Boston,  1876.)  To  this  ingenious  and 
sympathetic  sketch,  in  which  the  author  has  taken  great  pains  to 
collect  the  more  interesting  facts  of  Hawthorne's  life,  I  am  greatly 
indebted.  Mr.  Lathrop's  work  is  not  pitched  in  the  key  which  many 
another  writer  would  have  chosen,  and  his  tone  is  not  to  my  sense 
the  truly  critical  one ;  but  without  the  help  afforded  by  his  elaborate 
essay  the  present  little  volume  could  not  have  been  prepared. 


6  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

merits.  Hawthorne  was  by  race  of  the  clearest  Puritan 
strain.  His  earliest  American  ancestor  (who  wrote  the 
name  "  Hathorne  " — the  shape  in  which  it  was  transmit 
ted  to  Nathaniel,  who  inserted  the  w)  was  the  younger 
son  of  a  Wiltshire  family,  whose  residence,  according  to  a 
note  of  our  author's  in  1837,  was  "  Wigcastle,  Wigton." 
Hawthorne,  in  the  note  in  question,  mentions  the  gentle 
man  who  was  at  that  time  the  head  of  the  family ;  but  it 
does  not  appear  that  he  at  any  period  renewed  acquaint 
ance  with  his  English  kinsfolk.  Major  William  Ila- 
thorne  came  out  to  Massachusetts  in  the  early  years  of 
the  Puritan  settlement;  in  1635  or  1636,  according  to 
the  note  to  which  I  have  just  alluded;  in  1630,  according 
to  information  presumably  more  accurate.  He  was  one 
of  the  band  of  companions  of  the  virtuous  and  exemplary 
John  Winthrop,  the  almost  lifelong  royal  Governor  of  the 
young  colony,  and  the  brightest  and  most  amiable  figure 
in  the  early  Puritan  annals.  How  amiable  William  Ha 
thorne  may  have  been  I  know  not,  but  he  was  evidently 
of  the  stuff  of  which  the  citizens  of  the  Commonwealth 
were  best  advised  to  be  made.  He  was  a  sturdy  fighting 
man,  doing  solid  execution  upon  both  the  inward  and  out 
ward  enemies  of  the  State.  The  latter  were  the  savages, 
the  former  the  Quakers;  the  energy  expended  by  the 
early  Puritans  in  resistance  to  the  tomahawk  not  weaken 
ing  their  disposition  to  deal  with  spiritual  dangers.  They 
employed  the  same  —  or  almost  the  same  —  weapons  in 
both  directions ;  the  flintlock  and  the  halberd  against  the 
Indians,  and  the  cat-o'-nine-tails  against  the  heretics.  One 
of  the  longest,  though  by  no  means  one  of  the  most  suc 
cessful,  of  Hawthorne's  shorter  tales  (The  Gentle  Boy) 
deals  with  this  pitiful  persecution  of  the  least  aggressive 
of  all  schismatic  bodies.  William  Hathorne,  who  had  been 


i.]  EARLY  YEARS.  7 

made  a  magistrate  of  the  town  of  Salem,  where  a  grant  of 
land  had  been  offered  him  as  an  inducement  to  residence, 
figures  in  New  England  history  as  having  given  orders 
that  "Anne  Coleman  and  four  of  her  friends"  should  be 
whipped  through  Salem,  Boston,  and  Dedham.  This  Anne 
Coleman,  I  suppose,  is  the  woman  alluded  to  in  that  fine 
passage  in  the  Introduction  to  The  Scarlet  Letter,  in  which 
Hawthorne  pays  a  qualified  tribute  to  the  founder  of  the 
American  branch  of  his  race. 

"  The  figure  of  that  first  ancestor,  invested  by  family  tra 
dition  with  a  dim  and  dusky  grandeur,  was  present  to  my 
boyish  imagination  as  fur  back  as  I  can  remember.  It  still 
haunts  me,  and  induces  a  sort  of  home-feeling  with  the  past, 
which  I  scarcely  claim  in  reference  to  the  present,  phase  of 
the  town.  I  seem  to  have  a  stronger  claim  to  a  residence 
here  on  account  of  this  grave,  bearded,  sable -cloaked  and 
steeple-crowned  progenitor  —  who  came  so  early,  with  his 
Bible  and  his  sword,  and  trode  the  unworn  street  with  such 
a  stately  port,  and  made  so  large  a  figure  as  a  man  of  war 
and  peace — a  stronger  claim  than  for  myself,  whose  name  is 
seldom  heard  and  my  face  hardly  known.  He  was  a  soldier, 
legislator, judge;  he  was  a  ruler  in  the  church;  he  had  all 
the  Puritanic  traits,  both  good  and  evil.  He  was  likewise  a 
bitter  persecutor,  as  witness  the  Quakers,  who  have  remem 
bered  him  in  their  histories,  and  relate  an  incident  of  his 
hard  severity  towards  a  woman  of  their  sect  which  will  last 
longer,  it  is  to  be  feared,  than  any  of  his  better  deeds,  though 
these  were  many." 

William  Hathorne  died  in  1681 ;  but  those  hard  quali 
ties  that  his  descendants  speaks  of  were  reproduced  in  his 
son  John,  who  bore  the  title  of  Colonel,  and  who  was  con 
nected,  too  intimately  for  his  honour,  with  that  deplorable 
episode  of  New  England  history,  the  persecution  of  the 


8  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

so-called  Witches  of  Salem.  John  Hathorne  is  introduced 
into  the  little  drama  entitled  The  Salem  Farms,  in  Long 
fellow's  New  England  Tragedies.  I  know  not  whether 
he  had  the  compensating  merits  of  his  father,  but  our  au 
thor  speaks  of  him,  in  the  continuation  of  the  passage  I 
have  just  quoted,  as  having  made  himself  so  conspicuous 
in  the  martyrdom  of  the  witches,  that  their  blood  may  be 
said  to  have  left  a  stain  upon  him.  "So  deep  a  stain, 
indeed,"  Hawthorne  adds,  characteristically,  "  that  his  old 
dry  bones  in  the  Charter  Street  burial-ground  must  still 
retain  it,  if  they  have  not  crumbled  utterly  to  dust." 
Readers  of  The  House  of  the  Seven  Gables  will  remember 
that  the  story  concerns  itself  with  a  family  which  is  sup 
posed  to  be  overshadowed  by  a  curse  launched  against  one 
of  its  earlier  members  by  a  poor  man  occupying  a  lowlier 
place  in  the  world,  whom  this  ill-advised  ancestor  had  been 
the  means  of  bringing  to  justice  for  the  crime  of  witch 
craft.  Hawthorne  apparently  found  the  idea  of  the  his 
tory  of  the  Pyncheons  in  his  own  family  annals.  His 
witch -judging  ancestor  was  reported  to  have  incurred  a 
malediction  from  one  of  his  victims,  in  consequence  of 
which  the  prosperity  of  the  race  faded  utterly  away.  "  I 
know  not,"  the  passage  I  have  already  quoted  goes  on, 
"  whether  these  ancestors  of  mine  bethought  themselves  to 
repent  and  ask  pardon  of  Heaven  for  their  cruelties,  or 
whether  they  are  now  groaning  under  the  heavy  conse 
quences  of  them  in  another  state  of  being.  At  all  events, 
I,  the  present  writer,  hereby  take  shame  upon  myself  for 
their  sakes,  and  pray  that  any  curse  incurred  by  them — as 
I  have  heard,  and  as  the  dreary  and  unprosperous  condi 
tion  of  the  race  for  some  time  back  would  argue  to  exist 
— may  be  now  and  henceforth  removed."  The  two  first 
American  Hathornes  had  been  people  of  importance  and 


i.]  EARLY  YEARS.  9 

responsibility;  but  with  the  third  generation  the  family 
lapsed  into  an  obscurity  from  which  it  emerged  in  the 
very  person  of  the  writer,  who  begs  so  gracefully  for  a  turn 
in  its  affairs.  It  is  very  true,  Hawthorne  proceeds,  in  the 
Introduction  to  The  Scarlet  Letter,  that  from  the  original 
point  of  view  such  lustre  as  he  might  have  contrived  to 
confer  upon  the  name  would  have  appeared  more  than 
questionable. 

"  Either  of  these  stern  and  black-browed  Puritans  would 
have  thought  it  quite  a  sufficient  retribution  for  his  sins  that 
after  so  long  a  lapse  of  years  the  old  trunk  of  the  fami 
ly  tree,  with  so  much  venerable  moss  upon  it,  should  have 
borne,  as  its  topmost  bough,  an  idler  like  myself.  No  aim 
that  I  have  ever  cherished  would  they  recognise  as  laudable ; 
no  success  of  mine,  if  my  life,  beyond  its  domestic  scope,  had 
ever  been  brightened  by  success,  would  they  deem  otherwise 
than  worthless,  if  not  positively  disgraceful.  *  What  is  he  V 
murmurs  one  grey  shadow  of  my  forefathers  to  the  other. 
'A  writer  of  story-books!  What  kind  of  a  business  in  life, 
what  manner  of  glorifying  God,  or  being  serviceable  to  man 
kind  in  his  day  and  generation,  may  that  be  ?  Why,  the 
degenerate  fellow  might  as  well  have  been  a  fiddler !'  Such 
are  the  compliments  bandied  between  my  great -grandsires 
and  myself  across  the  gulf  of  time !  And  yet,  let  them  scorn 
me  as  they  will,  strong  traits  of  their  nature  have  intertwined 
themselves  with  mine." 

In  this  last  observation  we  may  imagine  that  there  was 
not  a  little  truth.  Poet  and  novelist  as  Hawthorne  was, 
sceptia  and  dreamer  and  little  of  a  man  of  action,  late- 
coming  fruit  of  a  tree  which  might  seem  to  have  lost  the 
power  to  bloom,  he  was  morally,  in  an  appreciative  degree, 
a  chip  of  the  old  block.  His  forefathers  had  crossed  the 
Atlantic  for  conscience'  sake,  and  it  was  the  idea  of  the 


10  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

urgent  conscience  that  haunted  the  imagination  of  their 
so-called  degenerate  successor.  The  Puritan  strain  in  his 
blood  ran  clear — there  are  passages  in  his  Diaries,  kept 
during  his  residence  in  Europe,  which  might  almost  have 
been  written  by  the  grimmest  of  the  old  Salem  worthies. 
To  him  as  to  them,  the  consciousness  of  sin  was  the  most 
importunate  fact  of  life ;  and  if  they  had  undertaken  to 
write  little  tales,  this  baleful  substantive,  with  its  attendant 
adjective,  could  hardly  have  been  more  frequent  in  their 
pages  than  in  those  of  their  fanciful  descendant.  Haw 
thorne  had,  moreover,  in  his  composition,  contemplator  and 
dreamer  as  he  was,  an  element  of  simplicity  and  rigidity, 
a  something  plain  and  masculine  and  sensible,  which  might 
have  kept  his  black -browed  grandsires  on  better  terms 
with  him  than  he  admits  to  be  possible.  However  little 
they  might  have  appreciated  the  artist,  they  would  have 
approved  of  the  man.  The  play  of  Hawthorne's  intellect 
was  light  and  capricious,  but  the  man  himself  was  firm  and 
rational.  The  imagination  was  profane,  but  the  temper 
was  not  degenerate. 

The  "dreary  and  unprosperous  condition"  that  he 
speaks  of  in  regard  to  the  fortunes  of  his  family  is  an 
allusion  to  the  fact  that  several  generations  followed  each 
other  on  the  soil  in  which  they  had  been  planted,  that 
during  the  eighteenth  century  a  succession  of  Hathornes 
trod  the  simple  streets  of  Salem  without  ever  conferring 
any  especial  lustre  upon  the  town  or  receiving,  presum 
ably,  any  great  delight  from  it.  A  hundred  years  of 
Salem  would  perhaps  be  rather  a  dead -weight  for  any 
family  to  carry,  and  we  venture  to  imagine  that  the  Ha 
thornes  were  dull  and  depressed.  They  did  what  they 
could,  however,  to  improve  their  situation  ;  they  trod  the 
Salem  streets  as  little  as  possible.  They  went  to  sea,  and 


i.]  EARLY  YEARS.  11 

made  long  voyages ;  seamanship  became  the  regular  pro 
fession  of  the  family.  Hawthorne  has  said  it  in  charm 
ing  language.  "  From  father  to  son,  for  above  a  hundred 
years,  they  followed  the  sea ;  a  grey-headed  shipmaster,  in 
each  generation,  retiring  from  the  quarter-deck  to  the 
homestead,  while  a  boy  of  fourteen  took  the  hereditary 
place  before  the  mast,  confronting  the  salt  spray  and  the 
gale  which  had  blustered  against  his  sire  and  grandsire. 
The  boy  also,  in  due  time,  passed  from  the  forecastle  to 
the  cabin,  spent  a  tempestuous  manhood,  and  returned 
from  his  world-wanderings  to  grow  old  and  die,  and  min 
gle  his  dust  with  the  natal  earth."  Our  author's  grand 
father,  Daniel  Hathorne,  is  mentioned  by  Mr.  Lathrop,  his 
biographer  and  son  -  in  -  law,  as  a  hardy  privateer  during 
the  war  of  Independence.  His  father,  from  whom  he  was 
named,  was  also  a  shipmaster,  and  he  died  in  foreign  lands, 
in  the  exercise  of  his  profession.  He  was  carried  off  by 
a  fever,  at  Surinam,  in  1808.  He  left  three  children,  of 
whom  Nathaniel  was  the  only  boy.  The  boy's  mother, 
who  had  been  a  Miss  Manning,  came  of  a  New  England 
stock  almost  as  long  established  as  that  of  her  husband ; 
she  is  described  by  our  author's  biographer  as  a  woman 
of  remarkable  beauty,  and  by  an  authority  whom  he 
quotes,  as  being  "  a  minute  observer  of  religious  festivals," 
of  "  feasts,  fasts,  new  -  moons,  and  Sabbaths."  Of  feasts 
the  poor  lady  in  her  Puritanic  home  can  have  had  but  a 
very  limited  number  to  celebrate ;  but  of  new-moons  she 
may  be  supposed  to  have  enjoyed  the  usual,  and  of  Sab 
baths  even  more  than  the  usual,  proportion. 

In  quiet  provincial  Salem,  Nathaniel  Hawthorne  passed 
the  greater  part  of  his  boyhood,  as  well  as  many  years  of 
his  later  life.  Mr.  Lathrop  has  much  to  say  about  the  an 
cient  picturesqueness  of  the  place,  and  about  the  mystic 


12  HAWTHOKNE.  [CHAP. 

influences  it  would  project  upon  such  a  mind  and  charac 
ter  as  Hawthorne's.  These  things  are  always  relative,  and 
in  appreciating  them  everything  depends  upon  the  point 
of  view.  Mr.  Lathrop  writes  for  American  readers,  who  in 
such  a  matter  as  this  are  very  easy  to  please.  Americans 
have,  as  a  general  thing,  a  hungry  passion  for  the  pictu 
resque,  and  they  are  so  fond  of  local  colour  that  they  con 
trive  to  perceive  it  in  localities  in  which  the  amateurs  of 
other  countries  would  detect  only  the  most  neutral  tints. 
History,  as  yet,  has  left  in  the  United  States  but  so  thin 
and  impalpable  a  deposit  that  we  very  soon  touch  the 
hard  substratum  of  nature ;  and  nature  herself,  in  the  West 
ern  World,  has  the  peculiarity  of  seeming  rather  crude  and 
immature.  The  very  air  looks  new  and  young  ;  the  light 
of  the  sun  seems  fresh  and  innocent,  as  if  it  knew  as  yet 
but  few  of  the  secrets  of  the  world  and  none  of  the  weari 
ness  of  shining;  the  vegetation  has  the  appearance  of  not 
having  reached  its  majority.  A  large  juvenility  is  stamped 
upon  the  face  of  things,  and  in  the  vividness  of  the  pres 
ent,  the  past,  which  died  so  young  and  had  time  to  pro 
duce  so  little,  attracts  but  scanty  'attention.  I  doubt 
whether  English  observers  would  discover  any  very  strik 
ing  trace  of  it  in  the  ancient  town  of  Salem.  Still,  with 
all  respect  to  a  York  and  a  Shrewsbury,  to  a  Toledo  and  a 
Verona,  Salem  has  a  physiognomy  in  which  the  past  plays 
a  more  important  part  than  the  present.  It  is  of  course  a 
very  recent  past ;  but  one  must  remember  that  the  dead 
of  yesterday  are  not  more  alive  than  those  of  a  century 
ago.  I  know  not  of  what  picturesqueness  Hawthorne  was 
conscious  in  his  respectable  birthplace ;  I  suspect  his  per 
ception  of  it  was  less  keen  than  his  biographer  assumes  it 
to  have  been  ;  but  he  must  have  felt  at  least  that,  of  what 
ever  complexity  of  earlier  life  there  had  been  in  the  coun- 


i.]  EARLY  YEARS.  13 

try,  the  elm-shadowed  streets  of  Salem  were  a  recognisa 
ble  memento.  He  has  made  considerable  mention  of  the 
place,  here  and  there,  in  his  tales  ;  but  he  has  nowhere  di 
lated  upon  it  very  lovingly,  and  it  is  noteworthy  that  in 
The  House  of  the  Seven  Gables,  the  only  one  of  his  novels 
of  which  the  scene  is  laid  in  it,  he  has  by  no  means  availed 
himself  of  the  opportunity  to  give  a  description  of  it. 
He  had  of  course  a  filial  fondness  for  it — a  deep-seated 
sense  of  connection  with  it ;  but  he  must  have  spent  some 
very  dreary  years  there,  and  the  two  feelings,  the  mingled 
tenderness  and  rancour,  are  visible  in  the  Introduction  to 
The  Scarlet  Letter. 

"  The  old  town  of  Salem,"  he  writes — "  my  native  place, 
though  I  have  dwelt  much  away  from  it,  both  in  boyhood 
and  in  maturer  years — possesses,  or  did  possess,  a  hold  on  my 
•affections,  the  force  of  which  I  have  never  realized  during 
my  seasons  of  actual  residence  here.  Indeed,  so  far  as  the 
physical  aspect  is  concerned,  with  its  flat,  unvaried  surface, 
covered  chiefly  with  wooden  houses,  few  or  none  of  which 
pretend  to  architectural  beauty ;  its  irregularity,  which  is 
neither  picturesque  nor  quaint,  but  only  tame ;  its  long  and 
lazy  street,  lounging  wearisomely  through  the  whole  extent 
of  the  peninsula,  with  Gallows  Hill  and  New  Guinea  at  one 
end,  and  a  view  of  the  almshouse  at  the  other — such  being 
the  features  of  my  native  town,  it  would  be  quite  as  rea 
sonable  to  form  a  sentimental  attachment  to  a  disarranged 
chequer-board." 

But  he  goes  on  to  say  that  he  has  never  divested  him 
self  of  the  sense  of  intensely  belonging  to  it — that  the 
spell  of  the  continuity  of  his  life  with  that  of  his  prede 
cessors  has  never  been  broken.  "It  is  no  matter  that 
the  place  is  joyless  for  him  ;  that  he  is  weary  of  the  old 
wooden  houses,  the  mud  and  the  dust,  the  dead  level  of 


14  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

site  and  sentiment,  the  chill  east  wind,  and  the  chilliest  of 
social  atmosphere ; — all  these,  and  whatever  faults  besides 
he  may  see  or  imagine,  are  nothing  to  the  purpose.  The 
spell  survives,  and  just  as  powerfully  as  if  the  natal  spot 
were  an  earthly  paradise."  There  is  a  very  American 
quality  in  this  perpetual  consciousness  of  a  spell  on  Haw 
thorne's  part ;  it  is  only  in  a  country  where  newness  and 
change  and  brevity  of  tenure  are  the  common  substance  of 
life,  that  the  fact  of  one's  ancestors  having  lived  for  a  hun 
dred  and  seventy  years  in  a  single  spot  would  become  an 
element  of  one's  morality.  It  is  only  an  imaginative 
American  that  would  feel  urged  to  keep  reverting  to  this 
circumstance,  to  keep  analysing  and  cunningly  consider 
ing  it. 

The  Salem  of  to  -  day  has,  as  New  England  towns  go, 
a  physiognomy  of  its  own,  and  in  spite  of  Hawthorne's 
analogy  of  the  disarranged  draught-board,  it  is  a  decidedly 
agreeable  one.  The  spreading  elms  in  its  streets ;  the  pro 
portion  of  large,  square,  honourable  -  looking  houses,  sug 
gesting  an  easy,  copious  material  life ;  the  little  gardens ; 
the  grassy  waysides ;  the  open  windows ;  the  air  of  space 
and  salubrity  and  decency ;  and  above  all  the  intimation  of 
larger  antecedents — these  things  compose  a  picture  which 
has  little  of  the  element  that  painters  call  depth  of  tone, 
but  which  is  not  without  something  that  they  would  ad 
mit  to  be  style.  To  English  eyes  the  oldest  and  most 
honourable  of  the  smaller  American  towns  must  seem  in 
a  manner  primitive  and  rustic ;  the  shabby,  straggling, 
village  -  quality  appears  marked  in  them,  and  their  social 
tone  is  not  unnaturally  inferred  to  bear  the  village  stamp. 
Village-like  they  are,  and  it  would  be  no  gross  incivility  to 
describe  them  as  large,  respectable,  prosperous,  democratic 
villages.  But  even  a  village,  in  a  great  and  vigorous 


i.]  EAKLY  YEARS.  15 

democracy,  where  there  are  no  overshadowing  squires, 
where  the  "  county "  has  no  social  existence,  where  the 
villagers. are  conscious  of  no  superincumbent  strata  of 
gentility,  piled  upwards  into  vague  regions  of  privilege — 
even  a  village  is  not  an  institution  to  accept  of  more  or 
less  graceful  patronage ;  it  thinks  extremely  well  of  itself, 
and  is  absolute  in  its  own  regard.  Salem  is  a  sea-port,  but 
it  is  a  sea-port  deserted  and  decayed.  It  belongs  to  that 
rather  melancholy  group  of  old  coast-towns  scattered  along 
the  great  sea-face  of  New  England,  and  of  which  the  list 
is  completed  by  the  names  of  Portsmouth,  Plymouth,  New 
Bedford,  Newburyport,  Newport  —  superannuated  centres 
of  the  traffic  with  foreign  lands,  which  have  seen  their 
trade  carried  away  from  them  by  the  greater  cities.  As 
Hawthorne  says,  their  ventures  have  gone  "  to  swell,  need 
lessly  and  imperceptibly,  the  mighty  flood  of  commerce  at 
New  York  or  Boston."  Salem,  at  the  beginning  of  the 
present  century,  played  a  great  part  in  the  Eastern  trade ; 
it  was  the  residence  of  enterprising  shipowners  who  de 
spatched  their  vessels  to  Indian  and  Chinese  seas.  It  was 
a  place  of  large  fortunes,  many  of  which  have  remain 
ed,  though  the  activity  that  produced  them  has  passed 
away.  These  successful  traders  constituted  what  Haw 
thorne  calls  "the  aristocratic  class."  He  alludes  in  one 
of  his  slighter  sketches  (The  Sister  Years)  to  the  sway 
of  this  class,  and  the  "  moral  influence  of  wealth "  having 
been  more  marked  in  Salem  than  in  any  other  New  Eng 
land  town.  The  sway,  we  may  believe,  was  on  the  whole 
gently  exercised,  and  the  moral  influence  of  wealth  was 
not  exerted  in  the  cause  of  immorality.  Hawthorne  was 
probably  but  imperfectly  conscious  of  an  advantage  which 
familiarity  had  made  stale — the  fact  that  he  lived  in  the 
most  aemocratic  and  most  virtuous  of  modern  communi- 


16  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

ties.  Of  the  virtue  it  is  but  civil  to  suppose  that  his  own 
family  had  a  liberal  share ;  but  not.  much  of  the  wealth, 
apparently,  came  into  their  way.  Hawthorne  was  not  born 
to  a  patrimony,  and  his  income,  later  in  life,  never  exceed 
ed  very  modest  proportions. 

Of  his  childish  years  there  appears  to  be  nothing  very 
definite  to  relate,  though  his  biographer  devotes  a  good 
many  graceful  pages  to  them.  There  is  a  considerable 
sameness  in  the  behaviour  of  small  boys,  and  it  is  prob 
able  that  if  we  were  acquainted  with  the  details  of  our 
author's  infantine  career  we  should  find  it  to  be  made  up 
of  the  same  pleasures  and  pains  as  that  of  many  ingenuous 
lads  for  whom  fame  has  had  nothing  in  keeping. 

The  absence  of  precocious  symptoms  of  genius  is,  on 
the  whole,  more  striking  in  the  lives  of  men  who  have 
distinguished  themselves  than  their  juvenile  promise ; 
though  it  must  be  added  that  Mr.  Lathrop  has  made  out, 
as  he  was  almost  in  duty  bound  to  do,  a  very  good  case  in 
favour  of  Hawthorne's  having  been  an  interesting  child. 
He  was  not  at  any  time  what  would  be  called  a  sociable 
man,  and  there  is  therefore  nothing  unexpected  in  the  fact 
that  he  was  fond  of  long  walks  in  which  he  was  not 
known  to  have  had  a  companion.  "Juvenile  literature" 
was  but  scantily  known  at  that  time,  and"  the  enormous 
and  extraordinary  contribution  made  by  the  United  States 
to  this  department  of  human  happiness  was  locked  in  the 
bosom  of  futurity.  The  young  Hawthorne,  therefore,  like 
many  of  his  contemporaries,  was  constrained  to  amuse 
himself,  for  want  of  anything  better,  with  the  Pilgrim Js 
Progress  and  the  Faery  Queen.  A  boy  may  have  worse 
company  than  Bunyan  and  Spenser,  and  it  is  very  proba 
ble  that  in  his  childish  rambles  our  author  may  have  had 
associates  of  whom  there  could  be  no  record.  "VVIien  he 


i.]  EARLY  YEARS.  17 

was  nine  years  old,  he  met  -with,  an  accident  at  school 
which  threatened  for  awhile  to  have  serious  results.  He 
was  struck  on  the  foot  by  a  ball,  and  so  severely  lamed 
that  he  was  kept  at  home  for  a  long  time,  and  had  not 
completely  recovered  before  his  twelfth  year.  His  school, 
it  is  to  be  supposed,  was  the  common  day-school  of  New 
England — the  primary  factor  in  that  extraordinarily  per 
vasive  system  of  instruction  in  the  plainer  branches  of 
learning  which  forms  one  of  the  principal  ornaments  of 
American  life.  In  1818,  when  he  was  fourteen  years  old, 
he  was  taken  by  his  mother  to  live  in  the  house  of  an 
uncle,  her  brother,  who  was  established  in  the  town  of 
Raymond,  near  Lake  Sebago,  in  the  State  of  Maine.  The 
immense  State  of  Maine,  in  the  year  1818,  must  have  had 
an  even  more  magnificently  natural  character  than  it  pos 
sesses  at  the  present  day,  and  the  uncle's  dwelling,  in  con 
sequence  of  being  in  a  little  smarter  style  than  the  primi 
tive  structures  that  surrounded  it,  was  known  by  the  vil 
lagers  as  Manning's  Folly.  Mr.  Lathrop  pronounces  this 
region  to  be  of  a  "  weird  and  woodsy "  character ;  and 
Hawthorne,  later  in  life,  spoke  of  it  to  a  friend  as  the 
place  where  "I  first  got  my  cursed  habits  of  solitude." 
The  outlook,  indeed,  for  an  embryonic  novelist,  would  not 
seem  to  have  been  cheerful ;  the  social  dreariness  of  a 
small  New  England  community  lost  amid  the  forests  of 
Maine,  at  the  beginning  of  the  present  century,  must  have 
been  consummate.  But  for  a  boy  with  a  relish  for  soli 
tude  there  were  many  natural  resources,  and  we  can  under 
stand  that  Hawthorne  should  in  after- years  have  spoken 
very  tenderly  of  this  episode.  "  I  lived  in  Maine  like  a 
bird  of  the  air,  so  perfect  was  the  freedom  I  enjoyed." 
During  the  long  summer  days  he  roamed,  gun  in  hand, 
through  the  great  woods ;  and  during  the  moonlight  nights 
2 


18  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

of  winter,  says  his  biographer,  quoting  another  informant, 
"  he  would  skate  until  midnight,  all  alone,  upon  Sebago 
Lake,  with,  the  deep  shadows  of  the  icy  hills  on  either 
hand.'' 

In  1819  he  was  sent  back  to  Salem  to  school;  and  in 
the  following  year  he  wrote  to  his  mother,  who  had  re 
mained  at  Raymond  (the  boy  had  found  a  home  at  Salem 
with  another  uncle),  "I  have  left  school,  and  have  begun 
to  fit  for  college  under  Benjm.  L.  Oliver,  Lawyer.  So  you 
are  in  danger  of  having  one  learned  man  in  your  fam 
ily.  ...  I  get  my  lessons  at  home,  and  recite  them  to  him 

(Mr.  Oliver)  at  seven  o'clock  in  the  morning Shall  you 

want  me  to  be  a  Minister,  Doctor,  or  Lawyer?  A  Minis 
ter  I  will  not  be."  He  adds,  at  the  close  of  this  epistle — 
"  O  how  I  wish  I  was  again  with  you,  with  nothing  to  do 
but  to  go  a-gunning !  But  the  happiest  days  of  my  life 
are  gone."  In  1821,  in  his  seventeenth  year,  he  entered 
Bowdoin  College,  at  Brunswick,  Maine.  This  institution 
was  in  the  year  1821  —  a  quarter  of  a  century  after  its 
foundation  —  a  highly  honourable,  but  not  a  very  elab 
orately  organized,  nor  a  particularly  impressive,  seat  of 
learning.  I  say  it  was  not  impressive,  but  I  immediately 
remember  that  impressions  depend  upon  the  minds  receiv 
ing  them ;  and  that  to  a  group  of  simple  New  England 
lads,  upwards  of  sixty  years  ago,  the  halls  and  groves  of 
Bowdoin,  neither  dense  nor  lofty  though  they  can  have 
been,  may  have  seemed  replete  with  Academic  stateliness. 
It  was  a  homely,  simple,  frugal,  "  country  college,"  of  the 
old-fashioned  American  stamp ;  exerting  within  its  limits 
a  civilizing  influence,  working,  amid  the  forests  and  the 
lakes,  the  log-houses  and  the  clearings,  toward  the  ameni 
ties  and  humanities  and  other  collegiate  graces,  and  offer 
ing  a  very  sufficient  education  to  the  future  lawyers,  mer- 


i.]  EARLY  YEARS.  19 

chants,  clergymen,  politicians,  and  editors,  of  the  very  act 
ive  and  knowledge -loving  community  that  supported  it. 
It  did  more  than  this — it  numbered  poets  and  statesmen 
among  its  undergraduates,  and  on  the  roll-call  of  its  sons  it 
has  several  distinguished  names.  Among  Hawthorne's  fel 
low-students  was  Henry  Wadsworth  Longfellow,  who  di 
vides  with  our  author  the  honour  of  being  the  most  distin 
guished  of  American  men  of  letters.  I  know  not  whether 
Mr.  Longfellow  was  especially  intimate  with  Hawthorne  at 
this  period  (they  were  very  good  friends  later  in  life),  but 
with  two  of  his  companions  he  formed  a  friendship  which 
lasted  always.  One  of  these  was  Franklin  Pierce,  who  was 
destined  to  fill  what  Hawthorne  calls  "  the  most  august  po 
sition  in  the  world."  Pierce  was  elected  President  of  the 
United  States  in  1852.  The  other  was  Horatio  Bridge, 
who  afterwards  served  with  distinction  in  the  navy,  and 
to  whom  the  charming  prefatory  letter  of  the  collection  of 
tales  published  under  the  name  of  The  Snow  Image  is 
addressed.  "  If  anybody  is  responsible  at  this  day  for  my 
being  an  author,  it  is  yourself.  I  know  not  whence  your 
faith  came ;  but  while  we  were  lads  together  at  a  country 
college — gathering  blueberries  in  study-hours  under  those 
tall  Academic  pines;  or  watching  the  great  logs  as  they 
tumbled  along  the  current  of  the  Androscoggin  ;  or  shoot 
ing  pigeons  and  gray  squirrels  in  the  woods  ;  or  bat-fowl 
ing  in  the  summer  twilight;  or  catching  trout  in  that 
shadowy  little  stream  which,  I  suppose,  is  still  wandering 
riverward  through  the  forest — though  you  and  I  will  never 
cast  a  line  in  it  again — two  idle  lads,  in  short  (as  we,  need 
not  fear  to  acknowledge  now),  doing  a  hundred  things  the 
Faculty  never  heard  of,  or  else  it  had  been  worse  for  us — 
still  it  was  your  prognostic  of  your  friend's  destiny  that  he 
was  to  be  a  writer  of  fiction."  That  is  a  very  pretty  pict- 


20  .  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

ure,  but  it  is  a  picture  of  happy  urchins  at  school,  rather 
than  of  undergraduates  "panting,"  as  Macaulay  says  "for 
one-and-twenty."  Poor  Hawthorne  was  indeed  thousands 
of  miles  away  from  Oxford  and  Cambridge ;  that  touch 
about  the  blueberries  and  the  logs  on  the  Androscoggin 
tells  the  whole  story,  and  strikes  the  note,  as  it  were,  of 
his  circumstances.  But  if  the  pleasures  at  Bowdoin  were 
not  expensive,  so  neither  were  the  penalties.  The  amount 
of  Hawthorne's  collegiate  bill  for  one  term  was  less  than 
4£.,  and  of  this  sum  more  than  9s.  was  made  up  of  fines. 
The  fines,  however,  were  not  heavy.  Mr.  Lathrop  prints  a 
letter  addressed  by  the  President  to  "Mrs.  Elizabeth  C. 
Hathorne,"  requesting  her  co-operation  with  the  officers 
of  this  college  "  in  the  attempt  to  induce  your  son  faith 
fully  to  observe  the  laws  of  this  institution."  He  had  just 
been  fined  fifty  cents  for  playing  cards  for  money  during 
the  preceding  term.  "  Perhaps  he  might  not  have  gamed," 
the  President  adds,  "  were  it  not  for  the  influence  of  a  stu 
dent  whom  we  have  dismissed  from  college."  The  biog 
rapher  quotes  a  letter  from  Hawthorne  to  one  of  his  sis 
ters,  in  which  the  writer  says,  in  allusion  to  this  remark, 
that  it  is  a  great  mistake  to  think  that  he  has  been  led 
away  by  the  wicked  ones.  "  I  was  fully  as  willing  to  play 
as  the  person  he  suspects  of  having  enticed  me,  and  would 
have  been  influenced  by  no  one.  I  have  a  great  mind  to 
commence  playing  again,  merely  to  show  him  that  I  scorn 
to  be  seduced  by  another  into  anything  wrong."  There  is 
something  in  these  few  words  that  accords  with  the  im 
pression  that  the  observant  reader  of  Hawthorne  gathers 
of  the  personal  character  that  underlay  his  duskily-sportive 
imagination — an  impression  of  simple  manliness  and  trans 
parent  honesty. 

He  appears  to  have  been  a  fair  scholar,  but  not  a  brill- 


i.]  EARLY  YEARS.  21 

iant  one ;  and  it  is  very  probable  that,  as  the  standard  of 
scholarship  at  Bowdoin  was  not  high,  he  graduated  none 
the  less  comfortably  on  this  account.  Mr.  Lathrop  is  able 
to  testify  to  the  fact,  by  no  means  a  surprising  one,  that 
he  wrote  verses  at  college,  though  the  few  stanzas  that  the 
biographer  quotes  are  not  such  as  to  make  us  especially 
regret  that  his  rhyming  inood  was  a  transient  one. 

"  The  ocean  hath  its  silent  caves, 

Deep,  quiet  and  alone. 
Though  there  be  fury  on  the  waves, 
Beneath  them  there  is  none." 

That  quatrain  may  suffice  to  decorate  our  page.  And  in 
connection  with  his  college  days,  I  may  mention  his  first 
novel,  a  short  romance  entitled  Fanshawe,  which  was  pub 
lished  in  Boston  in  1828,  three  years  after  he  graduated. 
It  was  probably  also  written  after  that  event,  but  the  scene 
of  the  tale  is  laid  at  Bowdoin  (which  figures  under  an  al 
tered  name) ;  and  Hawthorne's  attitude  with  regard  to  the 
book,  even  shortly  after  it  was  published,  was  such  as  to 
assign  it  to  this  boyish  period.  It  was  issued  anonymous 
ly  ;  but  he  so  repented  of  his  venture  that  he  annihilated 
the  edition,  of  which,  according  to  Mr.  Lathrop, "  not  half 
a  dozen  copies  are  now  known  to  be  extant."  I  have  seen 
none  of  these  rare  volumes,  and  I  know  nothing  of  Fan- 
shawe  but  what  the  writer  just  quoted  relates.  It  is  the 
story  of  a  young  lady  who  goes  in  rather  an  odd  fashion 
to  reside  at  "  Harley  College "  (equivalent  of  Bowdoin), 
under  the  care  and  guardianship  of  Dr.  Melmoth,  the  Pres 
ident  of  the  institution,  a  venerable,  amiable,  unworldly, 
and  henpecked  scholar.  Here  she  becomes,  very  naturally, 
an  object  of  interest  to  two  of  the  students ;  in  regard  to 
whom  I  cannot  do  better  than  quote  Mr.  Lathrop.  One 


22  HAWTHOKNE.  [CHAP. 

of  these  young  men  "  is  Edward  Wolcott,  a  wealthy,  hand 
some,  generous,  healthy  young  fellow  from  one  of  the  sea 
port  towns ;  and  the  other,  Fanshawe  the  hero,  who  is  a 
poor  but  ambitious  recluse,  already  passing  into  a  decline 
through  overmuch  devotion  to  books  and  meditation. 
Fanshawe,  though  the  deeper  nature  of  the  two,  and  in 
tensely  moved  by  his  new  passion,  perceiving  that  a  union 
between  himself  and  Ellen  could  not  be  a  happy  one,  re 
signs  the  hope  of  it  from  the  beginning.  But  circum 
stances  bring  him  into  intimate  relation  with  her.  The 
real  action  of  the  book,  after  the  preliminaries,  takes  up 
only  some  three  days,  and  turns  upon  the  attempt  of  a 
man  named  Butler  to  entice  Ellen  away  under  his  protec 
tion,  then  marry  her,  and  secure  the  fortune  to  which  she 
is  heiress.  This  scheme  is  partly  frustrated  by  circum 
stances,  and  Butler's  purpose  towards  Ellen  thus  becomes 
a  much  more  sinister  one.  From  this  she  is  rescued  by 
Fanshawe ;  and  knowing  that  he  loves  her,  but  is  conceal 
ing  his  passion,  she  gives  him  the  opportunity  and  the 
right  to  claim  her  hand.  For  a  moment  the  rush  of  de 
sire  and  hope  is  so  great  that  he  hesitates;  then  he  refuses 
to  take  advantage  of  her  generosity,  and  parts  with  her  for 
a  last  time.  Ellen  becomes  engaged  to  Wolcott,  who  had 
won  her  heart  from  the  first ;  and  Fanshawe,  sinking  into 
rapid  consumption,  dies  before  his  class  graduates."  The 
story  must  have  had  a  good  deal  of  innocent  lightness ; 
and  it  is  a  proof  of  how  little  the  world  of  observation 
lay  open  to  Hawthorne  at  this  time,  that  he  should  have 
had  no  other  choice  than  to  make  his  little  drama  go  for 
ward  between  the  rather  naked  walls  of  Bowdoin,  where 
the  presence  of  his  heroine  was  an  essential  incongruity. 
He  was  twenty-four  years  old,  but  the  "  world,"  in  its  so 
cial  sense,  had  not  disclosed  itself  to  him.  He  had,  how- 


i.]  EARLY  YEARS.  23 

ever,  already,  at  moments,  a  very  pretty  writer's  touch,  as 
witness  this  passage,  quoted  by  Mr.  Lathrop,  and  which  is 
worth  transcribing.  The  heroine  has  gone  off  with  tho 
nefarious  Butler,  and  the  good  Dr.  Melmoth  starts  in  pur 
suit  of  her,  attended  by  young  Wolcott. 

" '  Alas,  youth,  these  are  strange  times,'  observed  the 
President,  'when  a  doctor  of  divinity  and  an  undergraduate 
set  forth,  like  a  knight-errant  and  his  squire,  in  search  of  a 
stray  damsel.  Methinks  I  am  an  epitome  of  the  church  mil 
itant,  or  a  new  species  of  polemical  divinity.  Pray  Heaven, 
however,  there  be  no  such  encounter  in  store  for  us ;  for  I 
utterly  forgot  to  provide  myself  with  weapons.' 

"  '  I  took  some  thought  for  that  matter,  reverend  knight,' 
replied  Edward,  whose  imagination  was  highly  tickled  by 
Dr.  Melmoth's  chivalrous  comparison. 

"  '  Ay,  I  see  that  you  have  girded  on  a  sword,'  said  the  di 
vine.  '  But  wherewith  shall  I  defend  myself?  my  hand  be 
ing  empty  except  of  this  golden-headed  staff,  the  gift  of  Mr. 
Langton.' 

"  '  One  of  these,  if  you  will  accept  it,'  answered  Edward, 
exhibiting  a  brace  of  pistols, '  will  serve  to  begin  the  conflict 
before  you  join  the  battle  hand  to  hand.' 

" '  Nay,  I  shall  find  little  safety  in  meddling  with  that 
deadly  instrument,  since  I  know  not  accurately  from  which 
end  proceeds  the  bullet,'  said  Dr.  Melmoth.  *  But  were  it 
not  better,  since  we  are  so  well  provided  with  artillery,  to 
betake  ourselves,  in  the  event  of  an  encounter,  to  some  stone 
w all  or  other  place  of  strength  ?' 

"  '  If  I  may  presume  to  advise,'  said  the  squire,  '  you,  as 
being  most  valiant  and  experienced,  should  ride  forward, 
lance  in  hand  (your  long  staff  serving  for  a  lance),  while  I 
annoy  the  enemy  from  afar.' 

"  'Like  Teucer,  behind  the  shield  of  Ajax,'  interrupted  Dr. 
Melmoth, '  or  David  with  his  stone  and  sling.  No,  no,  young 
man ;  I  have  left  unfinished  in  my  study  a  learned  treatise, 


24  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP.  i. 

important  not  only  to  the  present  age,  but  to  posterity,  for 
whose  sake  I  must  take  heed  to  my  safety.  But,  lo !  who 
rides  yonder  ?' " 

On  leaving  college,  Hawthorne  had  gone  back  to  live  at 
Salem. 


25 


CHAPTER  II. 

EARLY     MANHOOD. 

THE  twelve  years  that  followed  were  not  the  happiest  or 
most  brilliant  phase  of  Hawthorne's  life ;  they  strike  me, 
indeed,  as  having  had  an  altogether  peculiar  dreariness. 
They  had  their  uses ;  they  were  the  period  of  incubation 
of  the  admirable  compositions  which  eventually  brought 
him  reputation  and  prosperity.  But  of  their  actual  aridi 
ty  the  young  man  must  have  had  a  painful  consciousness ; 
he  never  lost  the  impression  of  it.  Mr.  Lathrop  quotes  a 
phrase  to  this  effect  from  one  of  his  letters,  late  in  life. 
"  I  am  disposed  to  thank  God  for  the  gloom  and  chill  of 
my  early  life,  in  the  hope  that  my  share  of  adversity  came 
then,  when  I  bore  it  alone."  And  the  same  writer  alludes 
to  a  touching  passage  in  the  English  Note-Books,  which  I 
shall  quote  entire : — 

"I  think  I  have  been  happier  this  Christmas  (1854)  than 
ever  before  —  by  my  own  fireside,  and  with  my  wife  and 
children  about  me — more  content  to  enjoy  what  I  have,  less 
anxious  for  anything  beyond  it,  in  this  life.  My  early  life 
was  perhaps  a  good  preparation  for  the  declining  half  of  life ; 
it  having  been  such  a  blank  that  any  thereafter  would  com 
pare  favourably  with  it.  For  a  long,  long  while,  I  have  occa 
sionally  been  visited  with  a  singular  dream ;  and  I  have  an 
impression  that  I  have  dreamed  it  ever  since  I  have  been  in 
2* 


26  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

England.  It  is,  that  I  am  still  at  college,  or  sometimes  even 
at  school — and  there  is  a  sense  that  I  have  been  there  uncon 
scionably  long,  and  have  quite  failed  to  make  such  progress 
as  my  contemporaries  have  done ;  and  I  seem  to  meet  some 
of  them  with  a  feeling  of  shame  and  depression  that  broods 
over  me  as  I  think  of  it,  even  when  awake.  This  dream,  re 
curring  all  through  these  twenty  or  thirty  years,  must  be  one 
of  the  effects  of  that  heavy  seclusion  in  which  I  shut  myself 
up  for  twelve  years  after  leaving  college,  when  everybody 
moved  onward  and  left  me  behind.  How  strange  that  it 
should  come  now,  when  I  may  call  myself  famous  and  pros 
perous  !— when  I  am  happy  too." 

The  allusion  here  is  to  a  state  of  solitude  which  was  the 
young  man's  positive  choice  at  the  time — or  into  which 
he  drifted  at  least  under  the  pressure  of  his  natural  shyness 
and  reserve.  He  was  not  expansive ;  he  was  not  addicted 
to  experiments  and  adventures  of  intercourse ;  he  was  not 
personally,  in  a  word,  what  is  called  sociable.  The  general 
impression  of  this  silence-loving  and  shade-seeking  side  of 
his  character  is  doubtless  exaggerated,  and,  in  so  far  as  it 
points  to  him  as  a  sombre  and  sinister  figure,  is  almost 
ludicrously  at  fault.  He  was  silent,  diffident,  more  inclined 
to  hesitate — to  watch,  and  wait,  and  meditate — than  to  pro 
duce  himself,  and  fonder,  on  almost  any  occasion,  of  being 
absent  than  of  being  present.  This  quality  betrays  itself 
in  all  his  writings.  There  is  in  all  of  them  something  cold, 
and  light,  and  thin — something  belonging  to  the  imagina 
tion  alone — which  indicates  a  man  but  little  disposed  to 
multiply  his  relations,  his  points  of  contact,  with  society. 
If  we  read  the  six  volumes  of  Note-Books  with  an  eye  to 
the  evidence  of  this  unsocial  side  of  his  life,  we  find  it  in 
sufficient  abundance.  But  we  find  at  the  same  time  that 
there  was  nothing  unamiable  or  invidious  in  his  shyness, 


ii.]  EARLY  MANHOOD.  27 

and,  above  all,  that  there  was  nothing  preponderantly 
gloomy.  The  qualities  to  which  the  Note-Books  most  tes 
tify  are,  on  the  whole,  his  serenity  and  amenity  of  mind. 
They  reveal  these  characteristics,  indeed,  in  an  almost  phe 
nomenal  degree.  The  serenity,  the  simplicity,  seem  in  cer 
tain  portions  almost  child-like  ;  of  brilliant  gaiety,  of  high 
spirits,  there  is  little ;  but  the  placidity  and  evenness  of 
temper,  the  cheerful  and  contented  view  of  the  things  he 
notes,  never  belie  themselves.  I  know  not  what  else  he 
may  have  written  in  this  copious  record,  and  what  passages 
of  gloom  and  melancholy  may  have  been  suppressed ;  but, 
as  his  Diaries  stand,  they  offer  in  a  remarkable  degree  the 
reflection  of  a  mind  whose  development  was  not  in  the  di 
rection  of  sadness.  A  very  clever  French  critic,  whose  fancy 
is  often  more  lively  than  his  observation  is  deep — M.  Emile 
Montegut — writing  in  the  Revue  des  Deux  Mondes,  in  the 
year  1860,  invents  for  our  author  the  appellation  of  "Un 
Komancier  Pessimiste."  Superficially  speaking,  perhaps, 
the  title  is  a  happy  one;  but  only  superficially.  Pessimism 
consists  in  having  morbid  and  bitter  views  and  theories 
about  human  nature  ;  not  in  indulging  in  shadowy  fancies 
and  conceits.  There  is  nothing  whatever  to  show  that 
Hawthorne  had  any  such  doctrines  or  convictions;  cer 
tainly  the  note  of  depression,  of  despair,  of  the  disposition 
to  undervalue  the  human  race,  is  never  sounded  in  his  Di 
aries.  These  volumes  contain  the  record  of  very  few  con 
victions  or  theories  of  any  kind ;  they  move  with  curious 
evenness,  with  a  charming,  graceful  flow,  on  a  level  which 
lies  above  that  of  a  man's  philosophy.  They  adhere  with 
such  persistence  to  this  upper  level  that  they  prompt  the 
reader  to  believe  that  Hawthorne  had  no  appreciable  phi 
losophy  at  all — no  general  views  that  were  in  the  least  un 
comfortable.  They  are  the  exhibition  of  an  unperplexed 


28  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

intellect.  I  said  just  now  that  the  development  of  Haw 
thorne's  mind  was  not  towards  sadness ;  and  I  should  be 
inclined  to  go  still  further,  and  say  that  his  mind  proper — 
his  mind  in  so  far  as  it  was  a  repository  of  opinions  and 
articles  of  faith — had  no  development  that  it  is  of  especial 
importance  to  look  into.  What  had  a  development  was 
his  imagination — that  delicate  and  penetrating  imagination 
which  was  always  at  play,  always  entertaining  itself,  always 
engaged  in  a  game  of  hide-and-seek  in  the  region  in  which 
it  seemed  to  him  that  the  game  could  best  be  played — 
among  the  shadows  and  substructions,  the  dark-based  pil 
lars  and  supports  of  our  moral  nature.  Beneath  this  move 
ment  and  ripple  of  his  imagination — as  free  and  sponta 
neous  as  that  of  the  sea-surface — lay  directly  his  personal 
affections.  These  were  solid  and  strong,  but,  according 
to  my  impression,  they  had  the  place  very  much  to  them 
selves. 

His  innocent  reserve,  then,  and  his  exaggerated,  but  by 
no  means  cynical,  relish  for  solitude,  imposed  themselves 
upon  him,  in  a  great  measure,  with  a  persistency  which 
helped  to  make  the  time  a  tolerably  arid  one — so  arid  a 
one,  indeed,  that  we  have  seen  that  in  the  light  of  later 
happiness  he  pronounced  it  a  blank.  But  in  truth,  if  these 
were  dull  years,  it  was  not  all  Hawthorne's  fault.  His  sit 
uation  was  intrinsically  poor — poor  with  a  poverty  that 
one  almost  hesitates  to  look  into.  When  we  think  of  what 
the  conditions  of  intellectual  life,  of  taste,  must  have  been 
in  a  small  New  England  town  fifty  years  ago ;  and  when 
we  think  of  a  young  man  of  beautiful  genius,  with  a  love 
of  literature  and  romance,  of  the  picturesque,  of  style  and 
form  and  colour,  trying  to  make  a  career  for  himself  in 
the  midst  of  them,  compassion  for  the  young  man  becomes 
our  dominant  sentiment,  and  we  see  the  large,  dry,  village- 


ii.]  EARLY  MANHOOD.  29 

picture  in  perhaps  almost  too  hard  a  light.  It  seems  to 
me,  then,  that  it  was  possibly  a  blessing  for  Hawthorne 
that  he  was  not  expansive  and  inquisitive,  that  he  lived 
much  to  himself,  and  asked  but  little  of  his  milieu.  If  he 
had  been  exacting  and  ambitious,  if  his  appetite  had  been 
large  and  his  knowledge  various,  he  would  probably  have 
found  the  bounds  of  Salem  intolerably  narrow.  But  his 
culture  had  been  of  a  simple  sort — there  was  little  of  any 
other  sort  to  be  obtained  in  America  in  those  days — and 
though  he  was  doubtless  haunted  by  visions  of  more  sug 
gestive  opportunities,  we  may  safely  assume  that  he  was 
not,  to  his  own  perception,  the  object  of  compassion  that 
he  appears  to  a  critic  who  judges  him  after  half  a  century's 
civilization  has  filtered  into  the  twilight  of  that  earlier  time. 
If  New  England  was  socially  a  very  small  place  in  those 
days,  Salem  was  a  still  smaller  one ;  and  if  the  American 
tone  at  large  was  intensely  provincial,  that  of  New  England 
was  not  greatly  helped  by  having  the  best  of  it.  The  state 
of  things  was  extremely  natural,  and  there  could  be  now 
no  greater  mistake  than  to  speak  of  it  with  a  redundancy 
of  irony.  American  life  had  begun  to  constitute  itself  from 
the  foundations ;  it  had  begun  to  be,  simply ;  it  was  at  an 
immeasurable  distance  from  having  begun  to  enjoy.  I  im 
agine  there  was  no  appreciable  group  of  people  in  New 
England  at  that  time  proposing  to  itself  to  enjoy  life ;  this 
was  not  an  undertaking  for  which  any  provision  had  been 
made,  or  to  which  any  encouragement  was  offered.  Haw 
thorne  must  have  vaguely  entertained  some  such  design 
upon  destiny  ;  but  he  must  have  felt  that  his  success  would 
have  to  depend  wholly  upon  his  own  ingenuity.  I  say  he 
must  have  proposed  to  himself  to  enjoy,  simply  because  he 
proposed  to  be  an  artist,  and  because  this  enters  inevitably 
into  the  artist's  scheme.  There  are  a  thousand  ways  of 


30  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

enjoying  life,  and  that  of  the  artist  is  one  of  the  most  in 
nocent.  But  for  all  that,  it  connects  itself  with  the  idea 
of  pleasure.  He  proposes  to  give  pleasure,  and  to  give  it 
he  must  first  get  it.  Where  he  gets  it  will  depend  upon 
circumstances,  and  circumstances  were  not  encouraging  to 
Hawthorne. 

He  was  poor,  he  was  solitary,  and  he  undertook  to  de 
vote  himself  to  literature  in  a  community  in  which  the  in 
terest  in  literature  was  as  yet  of  the  smallest.  It  is  not 
too  much  to  say  that  even  to  the  present  day  it  is  a  con 
siderable  discomfort  in  the  United  States  not  to  be  "in 
business."  The  young  man  who  attempts  to  launch  him 
self  in  a  career  that  does  not  belong  to  the  so-called  prac 
tical  order ;  the  young  man  who  has  not,  in  a  word,  an 
office  in  the  business  quarter  of  the  town,  with  his  name 
painted  on  the  door,  has  but  a  limited  place  in  the  social 
system,  finds  no  particular  bough  to  perch  upon.  He  is 
not  looked  at  askance,  he  is  not  regarded  as  an  idler ;  lit 
erature  and  the  arts  have  always  been  held  in  extreme  hon 
our  in  the  American  world,  and  those  who  practise  them 
are  received  on  easier  terms  than  in  other  countries.  If 
the  tone  of  the  American  world  is  in  some  respects  pro 
vincial,  it  is  in  none  more  so  than  in  this  matter  of  the 
exaggerated  homage  rendered  to  authorship.  The  gentle 
man  or  the  lady  who  has  written  a  book  is  in  many  circles 
the  object  of  an  admiration  too  indiscrim mating  to  operate 
as  an  encouragement  to  good  writing.  There  is  no  reason 
to  suppose  that  this  was  less  the  case  fifty  years  ago ;  but 
fifty  years  ago,  greatly  more  than  now,  the  literary  man 
must  have  lacked  the  comfort  and  inspiration  of  belonging 
to  a  class.  The  best  things  come,  as  a  general  thing,  from 
the  talents  that  are  members  of  a  group ;  every  man  works 
better  when  he  has  companions  working  in  the  same  line, 


IL]  EARLY  MANHOOD.  31 

and  yielding  the  stimulus  of  suggestion,  comparison,  emu 
lation.  Great  things,  of  course,  have  been  done  by  solita 
ry  workers ;  but  they  have  usually  been  done  with  double 
the  pains  they  would  have  cost  if  they  had  been  produced 
in  more  genial  circumstances.  The  solitary  worker  loses 
the  profit  of  example  and  discussion ;  he  is  apt  to  make 
awkward  experiments;  he  is  in  the  nature  of  the  case  more 
or  less  of  an  empiric.  The  empiric  may,  as  I  say,  be 
treated  by  the  world  as  an  expert ;  but  the  drawbacks  and 
discomforts  of  empiricism  remain  to  him,  and  are  in  fact 
increased  by  the  suspicion  that  is  mingled  with  his  grati 
tude,  of  a  want  in  the  public  taste  of  a  sense  of  the  pro 
portions  of  things.  Poor  Hawthorne,  beginning  to  write 
subtle  short  tales  at  Salem,  was  empirical  enough ;  he  was 
one  of,  at  most,  some  dozen  Americans  who  had  taken  up 
literature  as  a  profession.  The  profession  in  the  United 
States  is  still  very  young,  and  of  diminutive  stature ;  but 
in  the  year  1830  its  head  could  hardly  have  been  seen 
above-ground.  It  strikes  the  observer  of  to-day  that  Haw 
thorne  showed  great  courage  in  entering  a  field  in  which 
the  honours  and  emoluments  were  so  scanty  as  the  profits 
of  authorship  must  have  been  at  that  time.  I  have  said 
that  in  the  United  States  at  present  authorship  is  a  pedes 
tal,  and  literature  is  the  fashion ;  but  Hawthorne's  history 
is  a  proof  that  it  was  possible,  fifty  years  ago,  to  write  a 
great  many  little  masterpieces  without  becoming  known. 
He  begins  the  preface  to  the  Twice-Told  Tales  by  remark 
ing  that  he  was  "  for  many  years  the  obscurest  man  of  let 
ters  in  America."  When  once  this  work  obtained  recog 
nition,  the  recognition  left  little  to  be  desired.  Hawthorne 
never,  I  believe,  made  large  sums  of  money  by  his  writings, 
and  the  early  profits  of  these  charming  sketches  could  not 
have  been  considerable ;  for  many  of  them,  indeed,  as  they 


32  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

appeared  in  journals  and  magazines,  lie  had  never  been 
paid  at  all ;  but  the  honour,  when  once  it  dawned — and  it 
dawned  tolerably  early  in  the  author's  career — was  never 
thereafter  wanting.  Hawthorne's  countrymen  are  solidly 
proud  of  him,  and  the  tone  of  Mr.  Lathrop's  Study  is  in 
itself  sufficient  evidence  of  the  manner  in  which  an  Ameri 
can  story-teller  may  in  some  cases  look  to  have  his  eulogy 
pronounced. 

Hawthorne's  early  attempt  to  support  himself  by  his 
pen  appears  to  have  been  deliberate ;  we  hear  nothing  of 
those  experiments  in  counting-houses  or  lawyers'  offices,  of 
which  a  permanent  invocation  to  the  Muse  is  often  the 
inconsequent  sequel.  He  began  to  write,  and  to  try  and 
dispose  of  his  writings ;  and  he  remained  at  Salem  appar 
ently  only  because  his  family — his  mother  and  his  two  sis 
ters — lived  there.  His  mother  had  a  house,  of  which,  dur 
ing  the  twelve  years  that  elapsed  until  1838,  he  appears  to 
have  been  an  inmate.  Mr.  Lathrop  learned  from  his  sur 
viving  sister  that,  after  publishing  Fanshawe,  he  produced 
a  group  of  short  stories,  entitled  Seven  Tales  of  my  Native 
Land,  and  that  this  lady  retained  a  very  favourable  recol 
lection  of  the  work,  which  her  brother  had  given  her  to 
read.  But  it  never  saw  the  light;  his  attempts  to  get  it 
published  were  unsuccessful ;  and  at  last,  in  a  fit  of  irri 
tation  and  despair,  the  young  author  burned  the  manu 
script. 

There  is  probably  something  autobiographic  in  the 
striking  little  tale  of  The  Devil  in  Manuscript.  "  They 
have  been  offered  to  seventeen  publishers,"  says  the  hero 
of  that  sketch  in  regard  to  a  pile  of  his  own  lucubrations. 

"  It  would  make  you  stare  to  read  their  answers.  .  .  .  One 
man  publishes  nothing  but  school-books;  another  has  five 


ii.]  EARLY  MANHOOD.  33 

novels  already  under  examination ;  .  .  .  another  gentleman  is 
just  giving  up  business,  on  purpose,  I  verily  believe,  to  avoid 
publishing  my  book.  In  short,  of  all  the  seventeen  book 
sellers,  only  one  has  vouchsafed  even  to  read  my  tales;  and 
he — a  literary  dabbler  himself,  I  should  judge — has  the  im 
pertinence  to  criticise  them,  proposing  what  he  calls  vast  im 
provements,  and  concluding,  after  a  general  sentence  of  con 
demnation,  with  the  definitive  assurance  that  he  will  not  be 
concerned  on  any  terms.  .  .  .  But  there  does  seem  to  be  one 
righteous  man  among  these  seventeen  unrighteous  ones,  and 
he  tells  me.  fairly,  that  no  American  publisher  will  meddle 
with  an  American  work — seldom  if  by  a  known  writer,  and 
never  if  by  a  new  one — unless  at  the  writer's  risk." 

But  though  the  Seven  Tales  were  not  printed,  Haw 
thorne  proceeded  to  write  others  that  were ;  the  two  col 
lections  of  the  Twice-Told  Tales,  and  the  Snow  Image, 
are  gathered  from  a  series  of  contributions  to  the  local 
journals  and  the  annuals  of  that  day.  To  make  these 
three  volumes,  he  picked  out  the  things  he  thought  the 
best.  "  Some  very  small  part,"  he  says  of  what  remains, 
"  might  yet  be  rummaged  out  (but  it  would  not  be  worth 
the  trouble),  among  the  dingy  pages  of  fifteen  or  twenty- 
years-old  periodicals,  or  within  the  shabby  morocco  covers 
of  faded  Souvenirs"  These  three  volumes  represent  no 
large  amount  of  literary  labour  for  so  long  a  period,  and 
the  author  admits  that  there  is  little  to  show  "  for  the 
thought  and  industry  of  that  portion  of  his  life."  He 
attributes  the  paucity  of  his  productions  to  a  "  total  lack 
of  sympathy  at  the  age  when  his  mind  would  naturally 
have  been  most  effervescent."  "  He  had  no  incitement  to 
literary  effort  in  a  reasonable  prospect  of  reputation  or 
profit ;  nothing  but  the  pleasure  itself  of  composition,  an 
enjoyment  not  at  all  amiss  in  its  way,  and  perhaps  essen- 


34  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

tial  to  the  merit  of  the  work  in  hand,  but  which  in  the 
long  run  will  hardly  keep  the  chill  out  of  a  writer's  heart, 
or  the  numbness  out  of  his  fingers."  These  words  occur 
in  the  preface  attached  in  1851  to  the  second  edition  of 
the  Tivice-Told  Tales;  apropos  of  which  I  may  say  that 
there  is  always  a  charm  in  Hawthorne's  prefaces  which 
makes  one  grateful  for  a  pretext  to  quote  from  them.  At 
this  time  The  Scarlet  Letter  had  just  made  his  fame,  and 
the  short  tales  were  certain  of  a  large  welcome;  but  the 
account  he  gives  of  the  failure  of  the  earlier  edition  to 
produce  a  sensation  (it  had  been  published  in  two  vol 
umes,  at  four  years  apart),  may  appear  to  contradict  my 
assertion  that,  though  he  was  not  recognised  immediately, 
he  was  recognised  betimes.  In  1850,  when  The  Scarlet 
Letter  appeared,  Hawthorne  was  forty-six  years  old,  and 
this  may  certainly  seem  a  long-delayed  popularity.  On 
the  other  hand,  it  must  be  remembered  that  he  had  not 
appealed  to  the  world  with  any  great  energy.  The  Twice- 
Told  Tales,  charming  as  they  are,  do  not  constitute  a  very 
massive  literary  pedestal.  As  soon  as  the  author,  resort 
ing  to  severer  measures,  put  forth  The  'Scarlet  Letter,  the 
public  ear  was  touched  and  charmed,  and  after  that  it  was 
held  to  the  end.  "  Well  it  might  have  been !"  the  reader 
will  exclaim.  "  But  what  a  grievous  pity  that  the  dulness 
of  this  same  organ  should  have  operated  so  long  as  a  de 
terrent,  and,  by  making  Hawthorne  wait  till  he  was  nearly 
fifty  to  publish  his  first  novel,  have  abbreviated  by  so  much 
his  productive  career !"  The  truth  is,  he  cannot  have  been 
in  any  very  high  degree  ambitious ;  he  was  not  an  abun 
dant  producer,  and  there  was  manifestly  a  strain  of  gen 
erous  indolence  in  his  composition.  There  was  a  lovable 
want  of  eagerness  about  him.  Let  the  encouragement  of 
fered  have  been  what  it  might,  he  had  waited  till  he  was 


ii.]  EARLY  MANHOOD.  35 

• 
lapsing  from  middle-life  to  strike  his  first  noticeable  blow ; 

and  during  the  last  ten  years  of  his  career  he  put  forth  but 
two  complete  works,  and  the  fragment  of  a  third. 

It  is  very  true,  however,  that  during  this  early  period 
he  seems  to  have  been  very  glad  to  do  whatever  came  to 
his  hand.  Certain  of  his  tales  found  their  way  into  one 
of  the.  annuals  of  the  time,  a  publication  endowed  with  the 
brilliant  title  of  The  Boston  Token  and  Atlantic  Souvenir. 
The  editor  of  this  graceful  repository  was  S.  G.  Goodrich, 
a  gentleman  who,  I  suppose,  may  be  called  one  of  the  pi 
oneers  of  American  periodical  literature.  He  is  better 
known  to  the  world  as  Mr.  Peter  Parley,  a  name  under 
which  he  produced  a  multitude  of  popular  school-books, 
story-books,  and  other  attempts  to  vulgarize  human  knowl 
edge  and  adapt  it  to  the  infant  mind.  This  enterprising 
purveyor  of  literary  wares  appears,  incongruously  enough, 
to  have  been  Hawthorne's  earliest  protector,  if  protection 
is  the  proper  word  for  the  treatment  that  the  young  au 
thor  received  from  him.  Mr.  Goodrich  induced  him,  in 
1836,  to  go  to  Boston  to  edit  a  periodical  in  which  he  was 
interested,  The  American  Magazine  of  Useful  and  Enter 
taining  Knowledge.  I  have  never  seen  the  work  in  ques 
tion,  but  Hawthorne's  biographer  gives  a  sorry  account  of 
it.  It  was  managed  by  the  so-called  Bewick  Company, 
which  "  took  its  name  from  Thomas  Bewick,  the  English 
restorer  of  the  art  of  wood-engraving,  and  the  magazine 
was  to  do  his  memory  honour  by  his  admirable  illustra 
tions.  But  in  fact  it  never  did  any  one  honour,  nor 
brought  any  one  profit.  It  was  a  penny  popular  affair, 
containing  condensed  information  about  innumerable  sub 
jects,  no  fiction,  and  little  poetry.  The  woodcuts  were  of 
the  crudest  and  most  frightful  sort.  It  passed  through  the 
hands  of  several  editors  and  several  publishers.  Hawthorne 


36  HAWTHORNE,  [CHAP. 

was  engaged  at  a  salary  of  five  hundred  dollars  a  year ;  l>ut 
it  appears  that  he  got  next  to  nothing,  and  did  not  stay  in 
the  position  long."  Hawthorne  wrote  from  Boston  in  the 
winter  of  1836 :  "  I  came  here  trusting  to  Goodrich's  pos 
itive  promise  to  pay  me  forty-five  dollars  as  soon  as  I  ar 
rived  ;  and  he  has  kept  promising  from  one  day  to  another, 
till  I  do  not  see  that  he  means  to  pay  at  all.  I  have  now 
broke  off  all  intercourse  with  him,  and  never  think  of  go 
ing  near  him.  ...  I  don't  feel  at  all  obliged  to  him  about 
the  editorship,  for  he  is  a  stockholder  and  director  in  the 
Bewick  Company,  .  .  .  and  I  defy  them  to  get  another  to 
do  for  a  thousand  dollars  what  I  do  for  five  hundred." — 
"I  make  nothing,"  he  says  in  another  letter,  "of  writing  a 
history  or  biography  before  dinner."  Goodrich  proposed 
to  him  to  write  a  Universal  History  for  the  use  of  schools, 
offering  him  a  hundred  dollars  for  his  share  in  the  work. 
Hawthorne  accepted  the  offer,  and  took  a  hand — I  know 
not  how  large  a  one — in  the  job.  His  biographer  has 
been  able  to  identify  a  single  phrase  as  our  author's.  He 
is  speaking  of  George  IV. :  "Even  when  he  was  quite  a 
young  man,  this  King  cared  as  much  about  dress  as  any 
young  coxcomb.  He  had  a  great  deal  of  taste  in  such 
matters,  and  it  is  a  pity  that  he  was  a  King,  for  he  might 
otherwise  have  made  an  excellent  tailor."  The  Universal 
History  had  a  great  vogue,  and  passed  through  hundreds 
of  editions ;  but  it  does  not  appear  that  Hawthorne  ever 
received  more  than  his  hundred  dollars.  The  writer  of 
these  pages  vividly  remembers  making  its  acquaintance  at 
an  early  stage  of  his  education — a  very  fat,  stumpy-looking 
book,  bound  in  boards  covered  with  green  paper,  and  hav 
ing  in  the  text  very  small  woodcuts  of  the  most  primitive 
sort.  He  associates  it  to  this  day  with  the  names  of  Se- 
sostris  and  Scmiramis  whenever  he  encounters  them,  there 


IL]  EARLY  MANHOOD.  37 

having  been,  he  supposes,  some  account  of  the  conquests 
of  these  potentates  that  would  impress  itself  upon  the  im 
agination  of  a  child.  At  the  end  of  four  months  Haw 
thorne  had  received  but  twenty  dollars — four  pounds — for 
his  editorship  of  the  American  Magazine. 

There  is  something  pitiful  in  this  episode,  and  some 
thing  really  touching  in  the  sight  of  a  delicate  and  supe 
rior  genius  obliged  to  concern  himself  with  such  paltry  un 
dertakings.     The  simple  fact  was  that  for  a  man  attempt 
ing  at  that  time  in  America  to  live  by  his  pen,  there  were 
no  larger  openings ;  and  to  live  at  all  Hawthorne  had,  as 
the  phrase  is,  to  make  himself  small.     This  cost  him  less, 
moreover,  than  it  would  have  cost  a  more  copious  and 
strenuous  genius,  for  his  modesty  was  evidently  extreme, 
and  I  doubt  whether  he  had  any  very  ardent  consciousness 
of  rare  talent.      He  went  back  to  Salem;  and  from  this 
tranquil  standpoint,  in  the  spring  of  1837,  he  watched  the 
first  volume  of  his  Twice-Told  Tales  come  into  the  world. 
He  had  by  this  time  been  living  some  ten  years  of  his 
manhood  in  Salem,  and  an  American  commentator  may  be 
excused  for  feeling  the  desire  to  construct,  from  the  very 
scanty  material  that  offers  itself,  a  slight  picture  of  his  life 
there.     I  have  quoted  his  own  allusions  to  its  dulness  and 
blankness,  but  I  confess  that  these  observations  serve  rather 
to  quicken  than  to  depress  my  curiosity.      A  biographer 
has  of  necessity  a  relish  for  detail ;  his  business  is  to  mul 
tiply  points  of  characterisation.     Mr.  Lathrop  tells  us  that 
our  author  "  had  little  communication  with  even  the  mem 
bers  of  his  family.      Frequently  his  meals  \vere  brought 
and  left  at  his  locked  door,  and  it  was  not  often  that  the 
four  inmates  of  the  old  Herbert  Street  mansion  met  in 
family  circle.      He  never  read  his  stories   aloud  to  his 
mother  and  sisters.  .      .  It  was  the  custom  in  this  house- 


38  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

hold  for  the  several  members  to  remain  very  much  by 
themselves ;  the  three  ladies  were  perhaps  nearly  as  rigor 
ous  recluses  as  himself,  and,  speaking  of  the  isolation  which 
reigned  among  them,  Hawthorne  once  said, '  We  do  not 
even  live  at  our  house !' "  It  is  added  that  he  was  not  in 
the  habit  of  going  to  church.  This  is  not  a  lively  picture ; 
nor  is  that  other  sketch  of  his  daily  habits  much  more  ex 
hilarating,  in  which  Mr.  Lathrop  affirms  that  though  the 
statement  that  for  several  years  "he  never  saw  the  sun"  is 
entirely  an  error,  yet  it  is  true  that  he  stirred  little  abroad 
all  day,  and  "  seldom  chose  to  walk  in  the  town  except  at 
night."  In  the  dusky  hours  he  took  walks  of  many  miles 
along  the  coast,  or  else  wandered  about  the  sleeping  streets 
of  Salem.  These  were  his  pastimes,  and  these  were  ap 
parently  his  most  intimate  occasions  of  contact  with  life. 
Life,  on  such  occasions,  was  not  very  exuberant,  as  any  one 
will  reflect  who  has  been  acquainted  with  the  physiogno 
my  of  a  small  New  England  town  after  nine  o'clock  in  the 
evening.  Hawthorne,  however,  was  an  inveterate  observer 
of  small  things,  and  he  found  a  field  for  fancy  among 
the  most  trivial  accidents.  There  could  be  no  better  ex 
ample  of  this  happy  faculty  than  the  little  paper  entitled 
"  Night  Sketches,"  included  among  the  Twice-Told  Tales. 
This  small  dissertation  is  about  nothing  at  all,  and  to  call 
attention  to  it  is  almost  to  overrate  its  importance.  This 
fact  is  equally  true,  indeed,  of  a  great  many  of  its  compan 
ions,  which  give*even  the  most  appreciative  critic  a  singu 
lar  feeling  of  his  own  indiscretion — almost  of  his  own  cru 
elty.  They  are  so  light,  so  slight,  so  tenderly  trivial,  that 
simply  to  mention  them  is  to  put  them  in  a  false  position. 
The  author's  claim  for  them  is  barely  audible,  even  to  the 
most  acute  listener.  They  are  things  to  take  or  to  leave 
— to  enjoy,  but  not  to  talk  about.  Not  to  read  them 


ii.]  EARLY  MANHOOD.  39 

would  be  to  do  them  an  injustice  (to  read  them  is  essen 
tially  to  relish  them),  but  to  bring  the  machinery  of  criti 
cism  to  bear  upon  them  would  be  to  do  them  a  still  greater 
wrong.  I  must  remember,  however,  that  to  carry  this  prin 
ciple  too  far  would  be  to  endanger  the  general  validity  of 
the  present  little  work — a  consummation  which  it  can  only 
be  my  desire  to  avert.  Therefore  it  is  that  I  think  it  per 
missible  to  remark  that  in  Hawthorne  the  whole  class  of 
little  descriptive  effusions  directed  upon  common  things,  to 
which  these  just-mentioned  Night  Sketches  belong,  have  a 
greater  charm  than  there  is  any  warrant  for  in  their  sub 
stance.  The  charm  is  made  up  of  the  spontaneity,  the  per 
sonal  quality,  of  the  fancy  that  plays  through  them,  its 
mingled  simplicity  and  subtlety,  its  purity  and  its  bon 
homie.  The  Night  Sketches  are  simply  the  light,  familiar 
record  of  a  walk  under  an  umbrella,  at  the  end  of  a  long, 
dull,  rainy  day,  through  the  sloppy,  ill-paved  streets  of  a 
country  town,  where  the  rare  gas-lamps  twinkle  in  the  large 
puddles,  and  the  blue  jars  in  the  druggist's  window  shine 
through  the  vulgar  drizzle.  One  would  say  that  the  inspi 
ration  of  such  a  theme  could  have  had  no  great  force,  and 
such  doubtless  was  the  case ;  but  out  of  the  Salem  pud 
dles,  nevertheless,  springs,  flower-like,  a  charming  and  nat 
ural  piece  of  prose. 

I  have  said  that  Hawthorne  was  an  observer  of  small 
things,  and  indeed  he  appears  to  have  thought  nothing 
too  trivial  to  be  suggestive.  His  Note-Books  give  us  the 
measure  of  his  perception  of  common  and  casual  things, 
and  of  his  habit  of  converting  them  into  memoranda. 
These  Note-Books,  by  the  way — this  seems  as  good  a 
place  as  any  other  to  say  it — are  a  very  singular  series  of 
volumes ;  I  doubt  whether  there  is  anything  exactly  cor 
responding  to  them  in  the  whole  body  of  literature.  They 


40  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

were  published — in  six  volumes,  issued  at  intervals — some 
years  after  Hawthorne's  death,  and  no  person  attempting 
to  write  an  account  of  the  romancer  could  afford  to  regret 
that  they  should  have  been  given  to  the  world.  There  is 
a  point  of  view  from  which  this  may  be  regretted;  but 
the  attitude  of  the  biographer  is  to  desire  as  many  docu 
ments  as  possible.  I  am  thankful,  then,  as  a  biographer, 
for  the  Note-Books;  but  I  am  obliged  to  confess  that, 
though  I  have  just  re-read  them  carefully,  I  am  still  at  a 
loss  to  perceive  how  they  came  to  be  written — what  was 
Hawthorne's  purpose  in  carrying  on  for  so  many  years 
this  minute  and  often  trivial  chronicle.  For  a  person  de 
siring  information  about  him  at  any  cost,  it  is  valuable ; 
it  sheds  a  vivid  light  upon  his  character,  his  habits,  the 
nature  of  his  mind.  But  we  find  ourselves  wondering 
what  was  its  value  to  Hawthorne  himself.  It  is  in  a  very 
partial  degree  a  register  of  impressions,  and  in  a  still 
smaller  sense  a  record  of  emotions.  Outward  objects  play 
much  the  larger  part  in  it ;  opinions,  convictions,  ideas 
pure  and  simple,  are  almost  absent.  He  rarely  takes  his 
Note-Book  into  his  confidence,  or  commits  to  its  pages  any 
reflections  that  might  be  adapted  for  publicity ;  the  sim 
plest  way  to  describe  the  tone  of  these  extremely  objec 
tive  journals  is  to  say  that  they  read  like  a  series  of  very 
pleasant,  though  rather  dullish  and  decidedly  formal,  let 
ters,  addressed  to  himself  by  a  man  who,  having  suspicions 
that  they  might  be  opened  in  the  post,  should  have  de 
termined  to  insert  nothing  compromising.  They  contain 
much  that  is  too  futile  for  things  intended  for  publicity ; 
whereas,  on  the  other  hand,  as  a  receptacle  of  private  im 
pressions  and  opinions,  they  are  curiously  cold  and  empty. 
They  widen,  as  I  have  said,  our  glimpse  of  Hawthorne's 
mind  (I  do  not  say  that  they  elevate  our  estimate  of  it), 


ii.]  EARLY  MANHOOD.  41 

but  they  do  so  by  what  they  fail  to  contain,  as  much  as 
by  what  we  find  in  them.  Our  business  for  the  moment, 
however,  is  not  with  the  light  that  they  throw  upon  his 
intellect,  but  with  the  information  they  offer  about  his 
habits  and  his  social  circumstances. 

I  know  not  at  what  age  he  began  to  keep  a  diary  ;  the 
first  entries  in  the  American  volumes  are  of  the  summer 
of  1835.  There  is  a  phrase  in  the  preface  to  his  novel  of 
Transformation,  which  must  have  lingered  in  the  minds 
of  many  Americans  who  have  tried  to  write  novels,  and  to 
lay  the  scene  of  them  in  the  Western  world.  "  No  author, 
without  a  trial,  can  conceive  of  the  difficulty  of  writing  a 
romance  about  a  country  where  there  is  no  shadow,  no  an 
tiquity,  no  mystery,  no  picturesque  and  gloomy  wrong,  nor 
anything  but  a  commonplace  prosperity,  in  broad  and  sim 
ple  daylight,  as  is  happily  the  case  with  my  dear  native 
land."  The  perusal  of  Hawthorne's  American  Note-Books 
operates  as  a  practical  commentary  upon  this  somewhat 
ominous  text.  It  does  so  at  least  to  my  own  mind;  it 
would  be  too  much,  perhaps,  to  say  that  the  effect  would 
be  the  same  for  the  usual  English  reader.  An  American 
reads  between  the  lines — he  completes  the  suggestions — 
he  constructs  a  picture.  I  think  I  am  not  guilty  of  any 
gross  injustice  in  saying  that  the  picture  he  constructs 
from  Hawthorne's  American  diaries,  though  by  no  means 
without  charms  of  its  own,  is  not,  on  the  whole,  an  inter 
esting  one.  It  is  characterised  by  an  extraordinary  blank- 
ness — a  curious  paleness  of  colour  and  paucity  of  detail. 
Hawthorne,  as  I  have  said,  has  a  large  and  healthy  appe 
tite  for  detail,  and  one  is,  therefore,  the  more  struck  with 
the  lightness  of  the  diet  to  which,  his  observation  was  con 
demned.  For  myself,  as  I  turn  the  pages  of  his  journals, 
I  seem  to  see  the  image  of  the  crude  and  simple  society 
3 


42  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

in  which  he  lived.  I  use  these  epithets,  of  course,  not  in 
vidiously,  but  descriptively ;  if  one  desire  to  enter  as  close 
ly  as  possible  into  Hawthorne's  situation,  one  must  en 
deavour  to-  reproduce  his  circumstances.  We  are  struck 
with  the  large  number  of  elements  that  were  absent  from 
them,  and  the  coldness,  the  thinness,  the  blankness,  to  re 
peat  my  epithet,  present  themselves  so  vividly  that  our 
foremost  feeling  is  that  of  compassion  for  a  romancer 
looking  for  subjects  in  such  a  field.  It  takes  so  many 
things,  as  Hawthorne  must  have  felt  later  in  life,  when  he 
made  the  acquaintance  of  the  denser,  richer,  warmer  Eu 
ropean  spectacle  —  it  takes  such  an  accumulation  of  his 
tory  and  custom,  such  a  complexity  of  manners  and  types, 
to  form  a  fund  of  suggestion  for  a  novelist.  If  Haw 
thorne  had  been  a  young  Englishman,  or  a  young  French 
man  of  the  same  degroe  of  genius,  the  same  cast  of  mind, 
the  same  habits,  his  consciousness  of  the  world  around 
him  would  have  been  a  very  different  affair ;  however  ob 
scure,  however  reserved,  his  own  personal  life,  his  sense  of 
the  life  of  his  fellow-mortals  would  have  been  almost  in 
finitely  more  various.  The  negative  side  of  the  spectacle 
on  which  Hawthorne  looked  out,  in  his  contemplative 
saunterings  and  reveries,  might,  indeed,  with  a  little  in 
genuity,  be  made  almost  ludicrous ;  one  might  enumerate 
the  items  of  high  civilization,  as  it  exists  in  other  coun 
tries,  which  are  absent  from  the  texture  of  American  life, 
until  it  should  become  a  wonder  to  know  what  was  left. 
No  State,  in  the  European  sense  of  the  word,  and  indeed 
barely  a  specific  national  name.  No  sovereign,  no  court, 
no  personal  loyalty,  no  aristocracy,  no  church,  no  clergy, 
no  army,  no  diplomatic  service,  no  country  gentlemen,  no 
palaces,  no  castles,  nor  manors,  nor  old  country-houses,  nor 
parsonages,  nor  thatched  cottages,  nor  ivied  ruins;  no 


IL]  EARLY  MANHOOD.  43 

cathedrals,  nor  abbeys,  nor  little  Norman  churches ;  no 
great  Universities  nor  public  schools — no  Oxford,  nor 
Eton,  nor  Harrow ;  no  literature,  no  novels,  no  museums, 
no  pictures,  no  political  society,  no  sporting  class — no  Ep 
som  nor  Ascot !  Some  such  list  as  that  might  be  drawn 
up  of  the  absent  things  in  American  life — especially  in 
the  American  life  of  forty  years  ago,  the  effect  of  which, 
upon  an  English  or  a  French  imagination,  would  probably, 
as  a  general  thing,  be  appalling.  The  natural  remark,  in 
the  almost  lurid  light  of  such  an  indictment,  would  be  that 
if  these  things  are  left  out,  everything  is  left  out.  The 
American  knows  that  a  good  deal  remains ;  what  it  is  that 
remains — that  is  his  secret,  his  joke,  as  one  may  say.  It 
would  be  cruel,  in  this  terrible  denudation,  to  deny  him 
the  consolation  of  his  natural  gift,  that  "American  hu 
mour"  of  which  of  late  years  we  have  heard  so  much. 

But  in  helping  us  to  measure  what  remains,  our  author's 
Diaries,  as  I  have  already  intimated,  would  give  comfort 
rather  to  persons  who  might  have  taken  the  alarm  from 
the  brief  sketch  I  have  just  attempted  of  what  I  have 
called  the  negative  side  of  the  American  social  situation, 
than  to  those  reminding  themselves  of  its  fine  compensa 
tions.  Hawthorne's  entries  are  to  a  great  degree  accounts 
of  walks  in  the  country,  drives  in  stage-coaches,  people  he 
met  in  taverns.  The  minuteness  of  the  things  that  attract 
his  attention,  and  that  he  deems  worthy  of  being  com 
memorated,  is  frequently  extreme,  and  from  this  fact  we 
get  the  impression  of  a  general  vacancy  in  the  field  of 
vision.  "  Sunday  evening,  going  by  the  jail,  the  setting- 
sun  kindled  up  the  windows  most  cheerfully ;  as  if  there 
were  a  bright,  comfortable  light  within  its  darksome  stone 

wall."     "  I  went  yesterday  with  Monsieur  S to  pick 

raspberries.     He  fell  through  an  old  log -bridge,  thrown 


44  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP, 

over  a  hollow ;  looking  back,  only  his  head  and  shoulders 
appeared  through  the  rotten  logs  and  among  the  bushes. 
A  shower  coming  on,  the  rapid  running  of  "a  little  bare 
footed  boy,  coming  up  unheard,  and  dashing  swiftly  past 
us,  and  showing  us  the  soles  of  his  naked  feet  as  he  ran 
adown  the  path  and  up  the  opposite  side."  In  another 
place  he  devotes  a  page  to  a  description  of  a  dog  whom 
he  saw  running  round  after  its  tail;  in  still  another  he 
remarks,  in  a  paragraph  by  itself  — "  The  aromatic  odor 
of  peat-smoke  in  the  sunny  autumnal  air  is  very  pleasant." 
The  reader  says  to  himself  that  when  a  man  turned  thirty 
gives  a  place  in  his  mind — and  his  inkstand — to  such  trifles 
as  these,  it  is  because  nothing  else  of  superior  importance 
demands  admission.  Everything  n  the  Notes  indicates 
a  simple,  democratic,  thinly-composed  society  ;  there  is  no 
evidence  of  the  writer  finding  himself  in  any  variety  or 
intimacy  of  relations  with  any  one  or  with  anything.  We 
find  a  good  deal  of  warrant  for  believing  that  if  we  add 
that  statement  of  Mr.  Lathrop's  about  his  meals  being  left 
at  the  door  of  his  room,  to  rural  rambles  of  which  an  im 
pression  of  the  temporary  phases  of  the  local  apple-crop 
were  the  usual,  and  an  encounter  with  an  organ-grinder, 
or  an  eccentric  dog,  the  rarer,  outcome,  we  construct  a 
rough  image  of  our  author's  daily  life  during  the  several 
years  that  preceded  his  marriage.  He  appears  to  have 
read  a  good  deal ;  and  that  he  must  have  been  familiar 
with  the  sources  of  good  English,  we  see  from  his  charm 
ing,  expressive,  slightly  self  -  conscious,  cultivated,  but  not 
too  cultivated,  style.  Yet  neither  in  these  early  volumes 
of  his  Note-Books,  nor  in  the  later,  is  there  any  mention 
of  his  reading.  There  are  no  literary  judgments  or  im 
pressions — there  is  almost  no  allusion  to  works  or  to  au 
thors.  The  allusions  to  individuals  of  any  kind  are  indeed 


ii.]  EARLY  MANHOOD.  45 

much  less  numerous  than  one  might  have  expected ;  there 
is  little  psychology,  little  description  of  manners.  We  are 
told  by  Mr.  Lathrop  that  there  existed  at  Salem,  during 
the  early  part  of  Hawthorne's  life,  "a  strong  circle  of 
wealthy  families,"  which  "  maintained  rigorously  the  dis 
tinctions  of  class,"  and  whose  "  entertainments  were  splen 
did,  their  manners  magnificent."  This  is  a  rather  pictorial 
way  of  saying  that  there  were  a  number  of  people  in  the 
place — the  commercial  and  professional  aristocracy,  as  it 
were — who  lived  in  high  comfort  and  respectability,  and 
who,  in  their  small  provincial  way,  doubtless  had  preten 
sions  to  be  exclusive.  Into  this  delectable  company  Mr. 
Lathrop  intimates  that  his  hero  was  free  to  penetrate.  It 
is  easy  to  believe  it ;  and  it  would  be  difficult  to  perceive 
why  the  privilege  should  have  been  denied  to  a  young 
man  of  genius  and  culture,  who  was  very  good-looking 
(Hawthorne  must  have  been  in  these  days,  judging  by  his 
appearance  later  in  life,  a  strikingly  handsome  fellow),  and 
whose  American  pedigree  was  virtually  as  long  as  the 
longest  they  could  show.  But  in  fact  Hawthorne  appears 
to  have  ignored  the  good  society  of  his  native  place  almost 
completely ;  no  echo  of  its  conversation  is  to  be  found  in 
his  tales  or  his  journals.  Such  an  echo  would  possibly 
not  have  been  especially  melodious ;  and  if  we  regret  the 
shyness  and  stiffness,  the  reserve,  the  timidity,  the  sus 
picion,  or  whatever  it  was,  that  kept  him  from  knowing 
what  there  was  to  be  known,  it  is  not  because  we  have 
any  very  definite  assurance  that  his  gains  would  have  been 
great.  Still,  since  a  beautiful  writer  was  growing  up  in 
Salem,  it  is  a  pity  that  he  should  not  have  given  himself 
a  chance  to  commemorate  some  of  the  types  that  flourish 
ed  in  the  richest  soil  of  the  place.  Like  almost  all  people 
who  possess  in  a  strong  degree  the  story-telling  faculty, 


46  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

Hawthorne  had  a  democratic  strain  in  his  composition, 
and  a  relish  for  the  commoner  stuff  of  human  nature. 
Thoroughly  American  in  all  ways,  he  was  in  none  more 
so  than  in  the  vagueness  of  his  sense  of  social  distinctions, 
and  his  readiness  to  forget  them  if  a  moral  or  intellectual 
sensation  were  to  be  gained  by  it.  He  liked  to  fraternise 
with  plain  people,  to  take  them  on  their  own  terms,  and 
put  himself,  if  possible,  into  their  shoes.  His  Note-Books, 
and  even  his  tales,  are  full  of  evidence  of  this  easy  and 
natural  feeling  about  all  his  unconventional  fellow-mortals 
— this  imaginative  interest  and  contemplative  curiosity ; 
and  it  sometimes  takes  the  most  charming  and  graceful 
forms.  Commingled  as  it  is  with  his  own  subtlety  and 
delicacy,  his  complete  exemption  from  vulgarity,  it  is  one 
of  the  points  in  his  character  which  his  reader  comes 
most  to  appreciate — that  reader  I  mean  for  whom  he  is 
not,  as  for  some  few,  a  dusky  and  malarious  genius. 

But  even  if  he  had  had  personally  as  many  pretensions 
as  he  had  few,  he  must,  in  the  nature  of  things,  have  been 
more  or  less  of  a  consenting  democrat,  for  democracy  was 
the  very  key-stone  of  the  simple  social  structure  in  which 
he  played  his  part.  The  air  of  his  journals  and  his  tales 
alike  arc  full  of  the  genuine  democratic  feeling.  This 
feeling  has  by  no  means  passed  out  of  New  England  life  ; 
it  still  flourishes  in  perfection  in  the  great  stock  of  the 
people,  especially  in  rural  communities  ;  but  it  is  probable 
that  at  the  present  hour  a  writer  of  Hawthorne's  general 
fastidiousness  would  not  express  it  quite  so  artlessly.  "  A 
shrewd  gentlewoman,  who  kept  a  tavern  in  the  town,"  he 
says,  in  Chippings  with  a  Chisel,  "  was  anxious  to  obtain 
two  or  three  gravestones  for  the  deceased  members  of  her 
family,  and  to  pay  for  these  solemn  commodities  by  tak 
ing  the  sculptor  to  board."  This  image  of  a  gentlewoman 


ii.]  EARLY  MANHOOD.  47 

keeping  a  tavern  and  looking  out  for  boarders,  seems,  from 
the  point  of  view  to  which  I  allude,  not  at  all  incongruous. 
It  will  be  observed  that  the  lady  in  question  was  shrewd ; 
it  was  probable  that  she  was  substantially  educated,  and 
of  reputable  life,  and  it  is  certain  that  she  was  energetic. 
These  qualities  would  make  it  natural  to  Hawthorne  to 
speak  of  her  as  a  gentlewoman ;  the  natural  tendency  in 
societies  where  the  sense  of  equality  prevails  being  to 
take  for  granted  the  high  level  rather  than  the  low.  Per 
haps  the  most  striking  example  of  the  democratic  senti 
ment  in  all  our  author's  tales,  however,  is  the  figure  of  Un 
cle  Venner,  in  The  House  of  the  Seven  Gables.  Uncle  Ven- 
ner  is  a  poor  old  man  in  a  brimless  hat  and  patched  trou 
sers,  who  picks  up  a  precarious  subsistence  by  rendering, 
for  a  compensation,  in  the  houses  and  gardens  of  the  good 
people  of  Salem,  those  services  that  are  known  in  New 
England  as  "  chores."  He  carries  parcels,  splits  fire-wood, 
digs  potatoes,  collects  refuse  for  the  maintenance  of  his 
pigs,  and  looks  forward  with  philosophic  equanimity  to 
the  time  when  he  shall  end  his  days  in  the  almshouse. 
But,  in  spite  of  the  very  modest  place  that  he  occupies  in 
the  social  scale,  he  is  received  on  a  footing  of  familiarity 
in  the  household  of  the  far  -  descended  Miss  Pyncheon ; 
and  when  this  ancient  lady  and  her  companions  take  the 
air  in  the  garden  of  a  summer  evening,  he  steps  into  the 
estimable  circle  and  mingles  the  smoke  of  his  pipe  with 
their  refined  conversation.  This,  obviously,  is  rather  im 
aginative —  Uncle  Venner  is  a  creation  with  a  purpose. 
He  is  an  original,  a  natural  moralist,  a  philosopher;  and 
Hawthorne,  who  knew  perfectly  what  he  was  about  in  in 
troducing  him  —  Hawthorne  always  knew  perfectly  what 
he  was  about — wished  to  give  in  his  person  an  example 
of  humorous  resignation  and  of  a  life  reduced  to  the  sim- 


48  HAWTHORNE.  [CIIAP. 

plest  and  homeliest  elements,  as  opposed  to  the  fantastic 
pretensions  of  the  antiquated  heroine  of  the  story.  He 
wished  to  strike  a  certain  exclusively  human  and  personal 
note.  He  knew  that  for  this  purpose  he  was  taking  a  li 
cense  ;  but  the  point  is  that  he  felt  he  was  not  indulging 
in  any  extravagant  violation  of  reality.  Giving  in  a  let 
ter,  about  1830,  an  account  of  a  little  journey  he  was  mak 
ing  in  Connecticut,  lie  says,  of  the  end  of  a  seventeen  miles' 
stage,  that  "  in  the  evening,  however,  I  went  to  a  Bible- 
class  with  a  very  polite  and  agreeable  gentleman,  whom  I 
afterwards  discovered  to  be  a  strolling  tailor  of  very  ques 
tionable  habits." 

Hawthorne  appears  on  various  occasions  to  have  absent 
ed  himself  from  Salem,  and  to  have  wandered  somewhat 
through  the  New.  England  States.  But  the  only  one  of 
these  episodes  of  which  there  is  a  considerable  account  in 
the  Note-Books  is  a  visit  that  he  paid  in  the  summer  of 
1837  to  his  old  college  -  mate,  Horatio  Bridge,"  who  was 
living  upon  his  father's  property  in  Maine,  in  company 
with  an  eccentric  young  Frenchman,  a  teacher  of  his  native 
tongue,  who  was  looking  for  pupils  among  the  Northern 
forests.  I  have  said  that  there  was  less  psychology  in 
Hawthorne's  Journals  than  might  have  been  looked  for; 
but  there  is  nevertheless  a  certain  amount  of  it,  and  no 
where  more  than  in  a  number  of  pages  relating  to  this  re 
markable  "  Monsieur  S."  (Hawthorne,  intimate  as  he  ap 
parently  became  with  him,  always  calls  him  "  Monsieur," 
just  as  throughout  all  his  Diaries  he  invariably  speaks  of  all 
his  friends,  even  the  most  familiar,  as  "  Mr."  He  confers 
the  prefix  upon  the  unconventional  Thoreau,  his  fellow- 
woodsman  at  Concord,  and  upon  the  emancipated  brethren 
at  Brook  Farm.)  These  pages  are  completely  occupied 
with  Monsieur  S.,  who  was  evidently  a  man  of  character, 


ii.]  EARLY  MANHOOD.  49 

with  the  full  complement  of  his  national  vivacity.  There 
is  an  elaborate  effort  to  analyse  the  poor  young  French 
man's  disposition,  something  conscientious  and  painstak 
ing,  respectful,  explicit,  almost  solemn.  These  passages  are 
very  curious  as  a  reminder  of  the  absence  of  the  off-hand 
element  in  the  manner  in  which  many  Americans,  and 
many  New  Englanders  especially,  make  up  their  minds 
about  people  whom  they  meet.  This,  in  turn,  is  a  reminder 
of  something  that  may  be  called  the  importance  of  the  in 
dividual  in  the  American  world;  which  is  a  result  of  the 
newness  and  youthfulness  of  society,  and  of  the  absence  of 
keen  competition.  The  individual  counts  for  more,  as  it 
were,  and,  thanks  to  the  absence  of  a  variety  of  social  types 
and  of  settled  heads  under  which  he  may  be  easily  and 
conveniently  pigeon-holed,  he  is  to  a  certain  extent  a  won 
der  and  a  mystery.  An  Englishman,  a  Frenchman  —  a 
Frenchman  above  all — judges  quickly,  easily,  from  his  own 
social  standpoint,  and  makes  an  end  of  it.  He  has  not 
that  rather  chilly  and  isolated  sense  of  moral  responsibility 
which  is  apt  to  visit  a  New  Englander  in  such  processes ; 
and  he  has  the  advantage  that  his  standards  are  fixed  by 
the  general  consent  of  the  society  in  which  he  lives.  A 
Frenchman,  in  this  respect,  is  particularly  happy  and  com 
fortable,  happy  and  comfortable  to  a  degree  which  I  think 
is  hardly  to  be  over-estimated;  his  standards  being  the 
most  definite  in  the  world,  the  most  easily  and  promptly 
appealed  to,  and  the  most  identical  with  what  happens  to 
be  the  practice  of  the  French  genius  itself.  The  English 
man  is  not  quite  so  well  off,  but  he  is  better  off  than  his 
poor  interrogative  and  tentative  cousin  beyond  the  seas. 
He  is  blessed  with  a  healthy  mistrust  of  analysis,  and  hair 
splitting  is  the  occupation  he  most  despises.  There  is  al 
ways  a  little  of  the  Dr.  Johnson  in  him,  and  Dr.  Johnson 
3* 


50  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP,  n, 

would  have  had  wofully  little  patience  with  that  tendency 
to  weigh  moonbeams  which  in  Hawthorne  was  almost  as 
much  a  quality  of  race  as  of  genius;  albeit  that  Haw 
thorne  has  paid  to  Boswell's  hero  (in  the  chapter  on 
"  Lichfield  and  Uttoxeter,"  in  his  volume  on  England)  a 
tribute  of  the  finest  appreciation.  American  intellectual 
standards  are  vague,  and  Hawthorne's  countrymen  are  apt 
to  hold  the  scales  with  a  rather  uncertain  hand  and  a  some 
what  agitated  conscience. 


CHAPTER   III. 

EARLY      WRITING  S. 

THE  second  volume  of  the  Tioice-Told  Tales  was  publish 
ed  in  1845,  in  Boston ;  and  at  this  time  a  good  many  of 
the  stories  which  were  afterwards  collected  into  the  Mosses 
from  an  Old  Manse  had  already  appeared,  chiefly  in  The 
Democratic  Review,  a  sufficiently  flourishing  periodical  of 
that  period.  In  mentioning  these  things,  I  anticipate ; 
but  I  touch  upon  the  year  1845  in  order  to  speak  of 
the  two  collections  of  Twice-Told  Tales  at  once.  Dur 
ing  the  same  year  Hawthorne  edited  an  interesting  vol 
ume,  the  Journals  of  an  African  Cruiser,  by  his  friend 
Bridge,  who  had  gone  into  the  Navy  and  seen  something 
of  distant  waters.  His  biographer  mentions  that  even 
then  Hawthorne's  name  was  thought  to  bespeak  attention 
for  a  book,  and  he  insists  on  this  fact  in  contradiction  to 
the  idea  that  his  productions  had  hitherto  been  as  little 
noticed  as  his  own  declaration  that  he  remained  "for  a 
good  many  years  the  obscurest  man  of  letters  in  Ameri 
ca,"  might  lead  one,  and  has  led  many  people,  to  suppose. 
"  In  this  dismal  chamber  FAME  was  won,"  he  writes  in 
Salem,  in  1836.  And  we  find  in  the  Note-Books  (1840) 
this  singularly  beautiful  and  touching  passage  : — 


52  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

"  Here  I  sit  in  my  old  accustomed  chamber,  where  I  used 
to  sit  in  days  gone  by.  ...  Here  I  have  written  many  tales 
— many  that  have  been  burned  to  ashes,  many  that  have 
doubtless  deserved  the  same  fate.  This  claims  to  be  called 
a  haunted  chamber,  for  thousands  upon  thousands  of  visions 
have  appeared  to  me  in  it ;  and  some  few  of  them  have  be 
come  visible  to  the  world.  If  ever  I  should  have  a  biogra 
pher,  he  ought  to  make  great  mention  of  this  chamber  in  my 
memoirs,  because  so  much  of  my  lonely  youth  was  wasted 
here,  and  here  my  mind  and  character  -were  formed ;  and 
here  I  have  been  glad  and  hopeful,  and  here  I  have  been  de 
spondent.  And  here  I  sat  a  long,  long  time,  waiting  patient 
ly  for  the  world  to  know  me,  and  sometimes  wondering  why 
it  did  not  know  me  sooner,  or  whether  it  would  ever  know 
me  at  all — at  least  till  I  were  in  my  grave.  And  sometimes 
it  seems  to  me  as  if  I  were  already  in  the  grave,  with  only  life 
enough  to  be  chilled  and  benumbed.  But  oftener  I  was  hap 
py — at  least  as  happy  as  I  then  knew  how  to  be,  or  was  aware 
of  the  possibility  of  being.  By  and  by  the  world  found  me 
out  in  my  lonely  chamber,  and  called  me  forth— not,  indeed, 
with  a  loud  roar  of  acclamation,  but  rather  with  a  still  small 
voice — and  forth  I  went,  but  found  nothing  in  the  world  I 
thought  preferable  to  my  solitude  till  now.  .  .  .  And  now  I 
begin  to  understand  why  I  was  imprisoned  so  many  years  in 
this  lonely  chamber,  and  why  I  could  never  break  through 
the  viewless  bolts  and  bars ;  for  if  I  had  sooner  made  my 
escape  into  the  world,!  should  have  grown  hard  and  rough, 
and  been  covered  with  earthly  dust,  and  my  heart  might 
have  become  callous  by  rude  encounters  with  the  multi 
tude.  .  .  .  But  living  in  solitude  till  the  fulness  of  time  was 
come,  I  still  kept  the  dew  of  my  youth  and  the  freshness  of 
my  heart.  ...  I  used  to  think  that  I  could  imagine  all  pas 
sions,  all  feelings,  and  states  of  the  heart  and  mind ;  but  how 
little  did  I  know  ?  .  .  .  Indeed,  we  are  but  shadows :  we  are 
not  endowed  with  real  life,  and  all  that  seems  most  real 
about  us  is  but  the  thinnest  substance  of  a  dream — till  the 


in.]  EARLY  WRITINGS.  53 

heart  be  touched.  That  touch  creates  us  —  then  we  begin 
to  be — thereby  we  are  beings  of  reality  and  inheritors  of 
eternity." 

There  is  something  exquisite  in  the  soft  philosophy  of 
this  little  retrospect,  and  it  helps  us  to  appreciate  it  to 
know  that  the  writer  had  at  this  time  just  become  engaged 
to  be  married  to  a  charming  and  accomplished  person, 
with  whom  his  union,  which  took  place  two  years  later, 
was  complete  and  full  of  happiness.  But  I  quote  it  more 
particularly  for  the  evidence  it  affords  that,  already  in 
1840,  Hawthorne  could  speak  of  the  world  finding  him 
out  and  calling  him  forth,  as  of  an  event  tolerably  well  in 
the  past.  He  had  sent  the  first  of  the  Tiuice-Told  series 
to  his  old  college  friend,  Longfellow,  who  had  already 
laid,  solidly,  the  foundation  of  his  great  poetic  reputa 
tion,  and  at  the  time  of  his  sending  it  had  written  him  a 
letter  from  which  it  will  be  to  our  purpose  to  quote  a  few 
lines : — 

"  You  tell  me  you  have  met  with  troubles  and  changes.  I 
know  not  what  these  may  have  been ;  but  I  can  assure  you 
that  trouble  is  the  next  best  thing  to  enjoyment,  and  that 
there  is  no  fate  in  the  world  so  horrible  as  to  have  no  share 
in  either  its  joys  or  sorrows.  For  the  last  ten  years  I  have 
not  lived,  but  only  dreamed  of  living.  It  may  be  true  that 
there  may  have  been  some  unsubstantial  pleasures  here  in 
the  shade,  which  I  might  have  missed  in  the  sunshine,  but 
you  cannot  conceive  how  utterly  devoid  of  satisfaction  all 
my  retrospects  are.  I  have  laid  up  no  treasure  of  pleasant 
remembrances  against  old  age ;  but  there  is  some  comfort  in 
thinking  that  future  years  may  be  more  varied,  and  therefore 
more  tolerable,  than  the  past.  You  give  ine  more  credit  than 
I  deserve  in  supposing  that  I  have  led  a  studious  life.  I 
have  indeed  turned  over  a  good  many  books,  but  in  so  des 
ultory  a  way  that  it  cannot  be  called  study,  nor  has  it  left  me 


54  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

the  fruits  of  study.  ...  I  have  another  great  difficulty  in  the 
lack  of  materials ;  for  I  have  seen  so  little  of  the  world  that 
I  have  nothing  but  thin  air  to  concoct  my  stories  of,  and  it  is 
not  easy  to  give  a  life-like  semblance  to  such  shadowy  stuff. 
Sometimes,  through  a  peephole,  I  have  caught  a  glimpse  of 
the  real  world,  and  the  two  or  three  articles  in  which  I  have 
portrayed  these  glimpses  please  me  better  than  the  others." 

It  is  more  particularly  for  the  sake  of  the  concluding 
lines  that  I  have  quoted  this  passage;  for  evidently  no 
portrait  of  Hawthorne  at  this  period  is  at  all  exact  which 
fails  to  insist  upon  the  constant  struggle  which  must  have 
gone  on  between  his  shyness  and  his  desire  to  know  some 
thing  of  life ;  between  what  may  be  called  his  evasive  and 
Lis  inquisitive  tendencies.  I  suppose  it  is  no  injustice  to 
Hawthorne  to  say  that,  on  the  whole,  his  shyness  always 
prevailed ;  and  yet,  obviously,  the  struggle  was  constantly 
there.  He  says  of  his  Twice-Told  Tales,  in  the  preface, 
"They  are  not  the  talk  of  a  secluded  man  with  his  own 
mind  and  heart  (had  it  been  so  they  could  hardly  have 
failed  to  be  more  deeply  and  permanently  valuable,)  but 
his  attempts,  and  very  imperfectly  successful  ones,  to  open 
an  intercourse  with  the  world."  We  are  speaking  here  of 
small  things,  it  must  be  remembered — of  little  attempts, 
little  sketches,  a  little  world.  But  everything  is  relative, 
and  this  smallness  of  scale  must  not  render  less  apparent 
the  interesting  character  of  Hawthorne's  efforts.  As  for 
the  Twice- Told  Tales  themselves,  they  are  an  old  story 
now ;  every  one  knows  them  a  little,  and  those  who  ad 
mire  them  particularly  have  read  them  a  great  many  times. 
The  writer  of  this  sketch  belongs  to  the  latter  class,  and 
he  has  been  trying  to  forget  his  familiarity  with  them,  and 
ask  himself  what  impression  they  would  have  made  upon 
him  at  the  time  they  appeared,  in  the  first  bloom  of  their 


in.]  EARLY  WRITINGS.  55 

freshness,  and  before  the  particular  Hawthorne-quality,  as 
it  may  be  called,  had  become  an  established,  a  recognised 
and  valued,  fact.  Certainly  I  am  inclined  to  think,  if  one 
had  encountered  these  delicate,  dusky  flowers  in  the  blos- 
somless  garden  of  American  journalism,  one  would  have 
plucked  them  with  a  very  tender  hand;  one  would  have 
felt  that  here  was  something  essentially  fresh  and  new ; 
here,  in  no  extraordinary  force  or  abundance,  but  in  a  de 
gree  distinctly  appreciable,  was  an  original  element  in  lit 
erature.  When  I  think  of  it,  I  almost  envy  Hawthorne's 
earliest  readers ;  the  sensation  of  opening  upon  The  Great 
Carbuncle,  The  Seven  Vagabonds,  or  The  Threefold  Desti 
ny  in  an  American  annual  of  forty  years  ago,  must  have 
been  highly  agreeable. 

Among  these  shorter  things  (it  is  better  to  speak  of 
the  whole  collection,  including  the  Snow  Image  and  the 
Mosses  from  an  Old  Manse,  at  once)  there  are  three  sorts 
of  tales,  each  one  of  which  has  an  original  stamp.  There 
are,  to  begin  with,  the  stories  of  fantasy  and  allegory- — 
those  among  which  the  three  I  have  just  mentioned  would 
be  numbered,  and  which,  on  the  whole,  are  the  most  origi 
nal.  This  is  the  group  to  which  such  little  masterpieces  as 
Malvin's  Burial,  Rappacini's  Daughter,  and  Young  Good 
man  Brown  also  belong — these  two  last  perhaps  represent 
ing  the  highest  point  that  Hawthorne  reached  in  this  di 
rection.  Then  there  are  the  little  tales  of  New  England 
history,  which  are  scarcely  less  admirable,  and  of  which 
The  Grey  Champion,  The  Maypole  of  Merry  Mount,  and 
the  four  beautiful  Legends  of  the  Province  House,  as  they 
are  called,  are  the  most  successful  specimens.  Lastly  come 
the  slender  sketches  of  actual  scenes  and  of  the  objects 
and  manners  about  him,  by  means  of  which,  more  partic 
ularly,  he  endeavoured  "  to  open  an  intercourse  with  the 


56  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

world,"  and  which,  in  spite  of  their  slenderness,  have  an 
infinite  grace  and  charm.  Among  these  things  A  Rill 
from  the  Town  Pump,  The  Village  Uncle,  The  Toll-Gath 
erer's  Day,  the  Chippings  with  a  Chisel,  may  most  natu 
rally  be  mentioned.  As  we  turn  over  these  volumes  we 
feel  that  the  pieces  that  spring  most  directly  from  his 
fancy  constitute,  as  I  have  said  (putting  his  four  novels 
aside),  his  most  substantial  claim  to  our  attention.  It 
would  be  a  mistake  to  insist  too  much  upon  them ;  Haw 
thorne  was  himself  the  first  to  recognise  that.  "These 
fitful  sketches,"  he  says  in  the  preface  to  the  Mosses  from 
an  Old  Manse,  "  with  so  little  of  external  life  about  them, 
yet  claiming  no  profundity  of  purpose — so  reserved  even 
while  they  sometimes  seem  so  frank  —  often  but  half  in 
earnest,  and  never,  even  when  most  so,  expressing  satisfac 
torily  the  thoughts  which  they  profess  to  image — such 
trifles,  I  truly  feel,  afford  no  solid  basis  for  a  literary 
reputation."  This  is  very  becomingly  uttered;  but  it 
may  be  said,  partly  in  answer  to  it,  and  partly  in  confir 
mation,  that  the  valuable  element  in  these  things  was 
not  what  Hawthorne  put  into  them  consciously,  but  what 
passed  into  them  without  his  being  able  to  measure  it — 
the  element  of  simple  genius,  the  quality  of  imagination. 
This  is  the  real  charm  of  Hawthorne's  writing  —  this 
purity  and  spontaneity  and  naturalness  of  fancy.  For 
the  rest,  it  is  interesting  to  see  how  it  borrowed  a  par 
ticular  colour  from  the  other  faculties  that  lay  near  it 
— how  the  imagination,  in  this  capital  son  of  the  old  Pu 
ritans,  reflected  the  hue  of  the  more  purely  moral  part, 
of  the  dusky,  overshadowed  conscience.  The  conscience, 
by  no  fault  of  its  own,  in  every  genuine  offshoot  of  that 
sombre  lineage,  lay  under  the  shadow  of  the  sense  of  sin. 
This  darkening  cloud  was  no  essential  part  of  the  nature 


IIL]  EARLY  WRITINGS.  57 

of  the  individual ;  it  stood  fixed  in  the  general  moral 
heaven  under  which  he  grew  up  and  looked  at  life.  It 
projected  from  above,  from  outside,  a  black  patch  over  his 
spirit,  and  it  was  for  him  to  do  what  he  could  with  the 
black  patch.  There  were  all  sorts  of  possible  ways  of 
dealing  with  it;  they  depended  upon  the  personal  tem 
perament.  Some  natures  would  let  it  lie  as  it  fell,  and 
contrive  to  be  tolerably  comfortable  beneath  it.  Others 
would  groan  and  sweat  and  suffer;  but  the  dusky  blight 
would  remain,  and  their  lives  would  be  lives  of  misery. 
Here  and  there  an  individual,  irritated  beyond  endurance, 
would  throw  it  off  in  anger,  plunging  probably  into  what 
would  be  deemed  deeper  abysses  of  depravity.  Haw 
thorne's  way  was  the  best ;  for  he  contrived,  by  an  exqui 
site  process,  best  known  to  himself,  to  transmute  this  heavy 
moral  burden  into  the  very  substance  of  the  imagination, 
to  make  it  evaporate  in  the  light  and  charming  fumes  of 
artistic  production.  But  Hawthorne,  of  course,  was  ex 
ceptionally  fortunate ;  he  had  his  genius  to  help  him. 
Nothing  is  more  curious  and  interesting  than  this  almost 
exclusively  imported  character  of  the  sense  of  sin  in  Haw 
thorne's  mind;  it  seems«to  exist  there  merely  for  an  artis 
tic  or  literary  purpose.  He  had  ample  cognizance  of  the 
Puritan  conscience ;  it  was  his  natural  heritage ;  it  was  re 
produced  in  him  ;  looking  into  his  soul,  he  found  it  there. 
But  his  relation  to  it  was  only,  as  one  may  say,  intellectu 
al  ;  it  was  not  moral  and  theological.  He  played  with  it, 
and  used  it  as  a  pigment ;  he  treated  it,  as  the  metaphy 
sicians  say,  objectively.  He  was  not  discomposed,  dis 
turbed,  haunted  by  it,  in  the  manner  of  its  usual  and  regu 
lar  victims,  who  had  not  the  little  postern  door  of  fancy  to 
slip  through,  to  the  other  side  of  the  wall.  It  was,  indeed, 
to  his  imaginative  vision,  the  great  fact  of  man's  nature ; 


58  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

the  light  element  that  had  been  mingled  with  his  own 
composition  always  clung  to  this  rugged  prominence  of 
moral  responsibility,  like  the  mist  that  hovers  about  the 
mountain.  It  was  a  necessary  condition  for  a  man  of 
Hawthorne's  stock  that  if  his  imagination  should  take  li 
cense  to  amuse  itself,  it  should  at  least  select  this  grim 
precinct  of  the  Puritan  morality  for  its  play-ground.  He 
speaks  of  the  dark  disapproval  with  which  his  old  ances 
tors,  in  the  case  of  their  corning  to  life,  would  see  him 
trifling  himself  away  as  a  story-teller.  But  how  far  more 
darkly  would  they  have  frowned  could  they  have  under 
stood  that  he  had  converted  the  very  principle  of  their 
own  being  into  one  of  his  toys ! 

It  will  be  seen  that  I  am  far  from  being  struck  with 
the  justice  of  that  view  of  the  author  of  the  Twice -Told 
Tales,  which  is  so  happily  expressed  by  the  French  critic 
to  whom  I  alluded  at  an  earlier  stage  of  this  essay.  To 
speak  of  Hawthorne,  as  M.  Emile  Montegut  does,  as  a 
romancier  pessimists,  seems  to  me  very  much  beside  the 
mark.  He  is  no  more  a  pessimist  than  an  optimist,  though 
he  is  certainly  not  much  of  either.  He  does  not  pretend 
to  conclude,  or  to  have  a  philosophy  of  human  nature ;  in 
deed,  I  should  even  say  that  at  bottom  he  does  not  take 
human  nature  as  hard  as  he  may  seem,  to  do.  "  His  bitter 
ness,"  says  M.  Montegut,  "  is  without  abatement,  and  his 
bad  opinion  of  man  is  without  compensation.  .  .  .  His  lit 
tle  tales  have  the  air  of  confessions  which  the  soul  makes 
to  itself;  they  are  so  many  little  slaps  which  the  author 
applies  to  our  face."  This,  it  seems  to  me,  is  to  exagger 
ate  almost  immeasurably  the  reach  of  Hawthorne's  relish 
of  gloomy  subjects.  What  pleased  him  in  such  subjects 
was  their  picturesqueness,  their  rich  duskiness  of  colour, 
their  chiaroscuro;  but  they  were  not  the  expression  of 


HI.]  EARLY  WRITINGS.  59 

a  hopeless,  or  even  of  a  predominantly  melancholy,  feel 
ing  about  the  human  soul.  Such  at  least  is  my  own  im 
pression.  He  is  to  a  considerable  degree  ironical — this  is 
part  of  his  charm — part  even,  one  may  say,  of  his  bright 
ness;  but  he  is  neither  bitter  nor  cynical  —  lie  is  rarely 
even  what  I  should  call  tragical.  There  have  certainly 
been  story-tellers  of  a  gayer  and  lighter  spirit;  there 
have  been  observers  more  humorous,  more  hilarious — 
though  on  the  whole  Hawthorne's  observation  has  a  smile 
in  it  oftener  than  may  at  first  appear ;  but  there  has  rare 
ly  been  an  observer  more  serene,  less  agitated  by  what  he 
sees  and  less  disposed  to  call  things  deeply  into  question. 
As  I  have  already  intimated,  his  Note-Books  are  full  of 
this  simple  and  almost  childlike  serenity.  That  dusky 
pre  -  occupation  with  the  misery  of  human  life  and  the 
wickedness  of  the  human  heart  which  such  a  critic  as 
M.  Emile  Montegut  talks  about,  is  totally  absent  from 
them ;  and  if  we  may  suppose  a  person  to  have  read  these 
Diaries  before  looking  into  the  tales,  we  may  be  sure  that 
such  a  reader  would  be  greatly  surprised  to  hear  the 
author  described  as  a  disappointed,  disdainful  genius. 
"  This  marked  love  of  cases  of  conscience,"  says  M.  Mon 
tegut;  "this  taciturn,  scornful  cast  of  mind ;  this  habit  of 
seeing  sin  everywhere,  and  hell  always  gaping  open ;  this 
dusky  gaze  bent  always  upon  a  damned  world,  and  a  nat 
ure  draped  in  mourning;  these  lonely  conversations  of  the 
imagination  with  the  conscience ;  this  pitiless  analysis  re 
sulting  from  a  perpetual  examination  of  one's  self,  and 
from  the  tortures  of  a  heart  closed  before  men  and  open 
to  God — all  these  elements  of  the  Puritan  character  have 
passed  into  Mr.  Hawthorne,  or,  to  speak  more  justly,  have 
filtered  into  him,  through  a  long  succession  of  genera 
tions."  This  is  a  very  pretty  and  very  vivid  account  of 


CO  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

Hawthorne,  superficially  considered ;  and  it  is  just  such  a 
view  of  the  case  as  would  commend  itself  most  easily  and 
most  naturally  to  a  hasty  critic.  It  is  all  true  indeed,  with 
a  difference ;  Hawthorne  was  all  that  M.  Montegut  says, 
minus  the  conviction.  The  old  Puritan  moral  sense,  the 
consciousness  of  sin  and  hell,  of  the  fearful  nature  of  our 
responsibilities  and  the  savage  character  of  our  Taskmaster 
— these  things  had  been  lodged  in  the  mind  of  a  man  of 
Fancy,  whose  fancy  had  straightway  begun  to  take  liber 
ties  and  play  tricks  with  them — to  judge  them  (Heaven 
forgive  him !)  from  the  poetic  and  aesthetic  point  of  view, 
the  point  of  view  of  entertainment  and  irony.  This  ab 
sence  of  conviction  makes  the  difference;  but  the  differ 
ence  is  great. 

Hawthorne  was  a  man  of  fancy,  and  I  suppose  that,  in 
speaking  of  him,  it  is  inevitable  that  we  should  feel  our 
selves  confronted  with  the  familiar  problem  of  the  dif 
ference  between  the  fancy  and  the  imagination.  Of  the 
larger  and  more  potent  faculty  he  certainly  possessed  a 
liberal  share;  no  one  can  read  The  House  of  the  Seven 
Gables  without  feeling  it  to  be  a  deeply  imaginative  work. 
But  I  am  often  struck,  especially  in  the  shorter  tales,  of 
which  I  am  now  chiefly  speaking,  with  a  kind  of  small 
ingenuity,  a  taste  for  conceits  and  analogies,  which  bears 
more  particularly  what  is  called  the  fanciful  stamp.  The 
finer  of  the  shorter  tales  are  redolent  of  a  rich  imagination. 

"  Had  Goodman  Brown  fallen  asleep  in  the  forest  and  only 
dreamed  a  wild  dream  of  witch -meeting?  Be  it  so,  if  you 
will ;  but,  alas,  it  was  a  dream  of  evil  omen  for  young  Good 
man  Brown  !  a  stern,  a  sad,  a  darkly  meditative,  a  distrustful, 
if  not  a  desperate,  man,  did  he  become  from  the  night  of  that 
fearful  dream.  On  the  Sabbath-day,  when  the  congregation 
were  singing  a  holy  psalm,  he  could  not  listen,  because  an 


in.]  EARLY  WRITINGS.  61 

anthem  of  sin  rushed  loudly  upon  his  ear  and  drowned  all 
the  blessed  strain.  When  the  minister  spoke  from  the  pul 
pit,  with  power  and  fervid  eloquence,  and  with  his  hand  on 
the  open  Bible  of  the  sacred  truth  of  our  religion,  and  of 
saint-like  lives  and  triumphant  deaths,  and  of  future  bliss  or 
misery  unutterable,  then  did  Goodman  Brown  grow  pale, 
dreading  lest  the  roof  should  thunder  down  upon  the  gray 
blasphemer  and  his  hearers.  Often,  awaking  suddenly  at 
midnight,  he  shrank  from  the  bosom  of  Faith  ;  and  at  morn 
ing  or  eventide,  when  the  family  knelt  down  at  prayer,  he 
scowled  and  muttered  to  himself,  and  gazed  sternly  at  his 
wife,  and  turned  away.  And  when  he  had  lived  long,  and 
was  borne  to  his  grave  a  hoary  corpse,  followed  by  Faith,  an 
aged  woman,  and  children,  and  grandchildren,  a  goodly  pro 
cession,  besides  neighbours  not  a  few,  they  carved  no  hopeful 
verse  upon  his  tombstone,  for  his  dying  hour  was  gloom." 

There  is  imagination  in  that,  and  in  many  another  pas 
sage  that  I  might  quote ;  but  as  a  general  thing  I  should 
characterise  the  more  metaphysical  of  our  author's  short 
stories  as  graceful  and  felicitous  conceits.  They  seem  to 
me  to  be  qualified  in  this  manner  by  the  very. fact  that 
they  belong  to  the  province  of  allegory.  Hawthorne,  in 
his  metaphysical  moods,  is  nothing  if  not  allegorical,  and 
allegory,  to  my  sense,  is  quite  one  of  the  lighter  exercises 
of  the  imagination.  Many  excellent  judges,  I  know,  have 
a  great  stomach  for  it ;  they  delight  in  symbols  and  cor 
respondences,  in  seeing  a  story  told  as  if  it  were  another 
and  a  very  different  story.  I  frankly  confess  that  I  have, 
as  a  general  thing,  but  little  enjoyment  of  it,  and  that  it 
has  never  seemed  to  me  to  be,  as  it  were,  a  first-rate  lit 
erary  form.  It  has  produced  assuredly  some  first-rate 
works ;  and  Hawthorne  in  his  younger  years  had  been  a 
great  reader  and  devotee  of  Bunyan  and  Spenser,  the  great 
masters  of  allegory.  But  it  is  apt  to  spoil  two  good 


62  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

things — a  story  and  a  moral,  a  meaning  and  a  form  ;  and 
the  taste  for  it  is  responsible  for  a  large  part  of  the  forci 
ble-feeble  writing  that  has  been  inflicted  upon  the  world. 
The  only  cases  in  which  it  is  endurable  is  when  it  is  ex 
tremely  spontaneous,  when  the  analogy  presents  itself  with 
eager  promptitude.  When  it  shows  signs  of  having  been 
groped  and  fumbled  for,  the  needful  illusion  is  of  course 
absent,  and  the  failure  complete.  Then  the  machinery 
alone  is  visible,  and  the  end  to  which,  it  operates  becomes 
a  matter  of  indifference.  There  was  but  little  literary  crit 
icism  in  the  United  States  at  the  time  Hawthorne's  earlier 
works  were  published ;  but  among  the  reviewers  Edgar 
Poe  perhaps  held  the  scales  the  highest.  He,  at  any  rate,- 
rattled  them  loudest,  and  pretended,  more  than  any  one 
else,  to  conduct  the  weighing -process  on  scientific  princi 
ples.  Very  remarkable  was  this  process  of  Edgar  Foe's, 
and  very  extraordinary  were  his  principles ;  but  he  had  the 
advantage  of  being  a  man  of  genius,  and  his  intelligence 
was  frequently  great.  His  collection  of  critical  sketches 
of  the  American  writers  flourishing  in  what  M.  Taine 
would  call  his  milieu  and  moment,  is  very  curious  and 
interesting  reading,  and  it  has  one  quality  which  ought  to 
keep  it  from  ever  being  completely  forgotten.  It  is  prob 
ably  the  most  complete  and  exquisite  specimen  of  provin 
cialism  ever  prepared  for  the  edification  of  men.  Poe's 
judgments  are  pretentious,  spiteful,  vulgar ;  but  they  con 
tain  a  great  deal  of  sense  and  discrimination  as  well,  and 
here  and  there,  sometimes  at  frequent  intervals,  we  find  a 
phrase  of  happy  insight  imbedded  in  a  patch  of  the  most 
fatuous  pedantry.  He  wrote  a  chapter  upon  Hawthorne, 
and  spoke  of  him,  on  the  whole,  very  kindly ;  and  his  es 
timate  is  of  sufficient  value  to  make  it  noticeable  that  he 
should  express  lively  disapproval  of  the  large  part  allotted 


in.]  EARLY  WRITINGS.  63 

to  allegory  in  his  talcs  —  in  defence  of  winch,  lie  says, 
"  however,  or  for  whatever  object  employed,  there  is  scarce 
ly  one  respectable  word  to  be  said.  .  .  .  The  deepest  emo 
tion,"  he  goes  on,  "  aroused  within  us  by  the  happiest  alle 
gory  as  allegory,  is  a  very,  very  imperfectly  satisfied  sense 
of  the  writer's  ingenuity  in  overcoming  a  difficulty  we 
should  have  preferred  his  not  having  attempted  to  over 
come.  .  .  .  One  thing  is  clear,  that  if  allegory  ever  estab 
lishes  a  fact,  it  is  by  dint  of  overturning  a  fiction ;"  and 
Poe  has  furthermore  the  courage  to  remark  that  the  Pil 
grim's  Progress  is  a  "ludicrously  overrated  book."  Cer 
tainly,  as  a  general  thing,  we  are  struck  with  the  ingenuity 
'and  felicity  of  Hawthorne's  analogies  and  correspondences; 
the  idea  appears  to  have  made  itself  at  home  in  them  easi 
ly.  Nothing  could  be  better  in  this  respect  than  The  Snow 
Image  (a  little  masterpiece),  or  The  Great  Carbuncle,  or 
Doctor  Heidegger's  Experiment,  or  Rappacini's  Daughter. 
But  in  such  things  as  The  Birth-Mark  and  The  Bosom- 
Serpent  we  are  struck  with  something  stiff  and  mechan 
ical,  slightly  incongruous,  as  if  the  kernel  had  not  assimi 
lated  its  envelope.  But  these  are  matters  of  light  impres 
sion,  and  there  would  be  a  want  of  tact  in  pretending  to 
discriminate  too  closely  among  things  which  all,  in  one 
Avay  or  another,  have  a  charm.  The  charm  —  the  great 
charm — is  that  they  are  glimpses  of  a  great  field,  of  the 
whole  deep  mystery  of  man's  soul  and  conscience.  They 
are  moral,  and  their  interest  is  moral ;  they  deal  with  some 
thing  more  than  the  mere  accidents  and  conventionalities, 
the  surface  occurrences  of  life.  The  fine  thing  in  Haw 
thorne  is  that  he  cared  for  the  deeper  psychology,  and  that, 
in  his  way,  he  tried  to  become  familiar  with  it.  This  nat 
ural,  yet  fanciful,  familiarity  with  it ;  this  air,  on  the  au 
thor's  part,  of  being  a  confirmed  habitue  of  a  region  of 


64  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

mysteries  and  subtleties,  constitutes  the  originality  of  his 
tales.  And  then  they  have  the  further  merit  of  seeming, 
for  what  they  are,  to  spring  up  so  freely  and  lightly.  The 
author  has  all  the  ease,  indeed,  of  a  regular  dweller  in  the 
moral,  psychological  realm ;  he  goes  to  and  fro  in  it,  as  a 
man  who  knows  his  way.  His  tread  is  a  light  and  modest 
one,  but  he  keeps  the  key  in  his  pocket. 

His  little  historical  stories  all  seem  to  me  admirable; 
they  are  so  good  that  you  may  re-read  them  many  times. 
They  arc  not  numerous,  and  they  are  very  short ;  but  they 
are  full  of  a  vivid  and  delightful  sense  of  the  New  England 
past ;  they  have,  moreover,  the  distinction,  little  tales  of  a 
dozen  and  fifteen  pages  as  they  are,  of  being  the  only  sue-* 
cessful  attempts  at  historical  fiction  that  have  been  made 
in  the  United  States.  Hawthorne  was  at  home  in  the  early 
New  England  history ;  he  had  thumbed  its  records  and  he 
had  breathed  its  air,  in  whatever  odd  receptacles  this  some 
what  pungent  compound  still  lurked.  He  was  fond  of  it, 
and  he  was  proud  of  it,  as  any  New  Englander  must  be, 
measuring  the  part  of  that  handful  of  half-starved  fanatics 
who  formed  his  earliest  precursors,  in  laying  the  founda 
tions  of  a  mighty  empire.  Hungry  for  the  picturesque  as 
he  always  was,  and  not  finding  any  very  copious  provision 
of  it  around  him,  he  turned  back  into  the  two  preceding 
centuries,  with  the  earnest  determination  that  the  primitive 
annals  of  Massachusetts  should  at  least  appear  picturesque. 
His  fancy,  which  was  always  alive,  played  a  little  with  the 
somewhat  meagre  and  angular  facts  of  the  colonial  period, 
and  forthwith  converted  a  great  many  of  them  into  impres 
sive  legends  and  pictures.  There  is  a  little  infusion  of  col 
our,  a  little  vagueness  about  certain  details,  but  it  is  very 
gracefully  and  discreetly  done,  and  realities  are  kept  in  view 
sufficiently  to  make  us  feel  that  if  we  are  reading  romance, 


in.]  EARLY  WRITINGS.  65 

it  is  romance  that  rather  supplements  than  contradicts  his 
tory.  The  early  annals  of  New  England  were  not  fertile 
in  legend,  but  Hawthorne  laid  his  hands  upon  everything 
that  would  serve  his  purpose,  and  in  two  or  three  cases  his 
version  of  the  story  has  a  great  deal  of  beauty.  The  Grey 
Champion  is  a  sketch  of  less  than  eight  pages,  but  the  little 
figures  stand  up  in  the  tale  as  stoutly,  at  the  least,  as  if 
they  were  propped  up  on  half-a-dozen  chapters  by  a  dryer 
annalist ;  and  the  whole  thing  has  the  merit  of  those  cab 
inet  pictures  in  which  the  artist  has  been  able  to  make  his 
persons  look  the  size  of  life.  Hawthorne,  to  say  it  again, 
was  not  in  the  least  a  realist — he  was  not  to  my  mind 
enough  of  one ;  but  there  is  no  genuine  lover  of  the  good 
city  of  Boston  but  will  feel  grateful  to  him  for  his  cour 
age  in  attempting  to  recount  the  "  traditions  "  of  Washing 
ton  Street,  the  main  thoroughfare  of  the  Puritan  capital. 
The  four  Legends  of  the  Province  House  are  certain  shad 
owy  stories  which  he  professes  to  have  gathered  in  an 
ancient  tavern  lurking  behind  the  modern  shop  fronts  of 
this  part  of  the  city.  The  Province  House  disappeared 
some  years  ago,  but  while  it  stood  it  was  pointed  to  as 
the  residence  of  the  Royal  Governors  of  Massachusetts  be 
fore  the  -Revolution.  I  have  no  recollection  of  it ;  but  it 
cannot  have  been,  even  from  Hawthorne's  account  of  it — 
which  is  as  pictorial  as  he  ventures  to  make  it — a  very  im 
posing  piece  of  antiquity.  The  writer's  charming  touch, 
however,  throws  a  rich  brown  tone  over  its  rather  shallow 
venerableness ;  and  we  are  beguiled  into  believing,  for  in 
stance,  at  the  close  of  Howe^s  Masquerade  (a  story  of  a 
strange  occurrence  at  an  entertainment  given  by  Sir  Wil 
liam  Howe,  the  last  of  the  Royal  Governors,  during  the 
siege  of  Boston  by  Washington),  that  "  superstition,  among 
other  legends  of  this  mansion,  repeats  the  wondrous  tale 
4 


66  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

that  on  the  anniversary  night  of  Britain's  discomfiture  the 
ghosts  of  the  ancient  governors  of  Massachusetts  still  glide 
through  the  Province  House.  And  last  of  all  comes  a  fig 
ure  shrouded  in  a  military  cloak,  tossing  his  clenched 
hands  into  the  air,  and  stamping  his  iron-shod  boots  upon 
the  freestone  steps  with  a  semblance  of  feverish  despair, 
but  without  the  sound  of  a  foot-tramp."  Hawthorne  had, 
as  regards  the  two  earlier  centuries  of  New  England  life, 
that  faculty  which  is  called  now-a-days  the  historic  con 
sciousness.  He  never  sought  to  exhibit  it  on  a  large 
scale ;  he  exhibited  it,  indeed,  on  a  scale  so  minute  that  we 
must  not  linger  too  much  upon  it.  His  vision  of  the  past 
was  filled  with  definite  images — images  none  the  less  defi 
nite  that  they  were  concerned  with  events  as  shadowy  as 
this  dramatic  passing  away  of  the  last  of  King  George's 
representatives  in  his  long  loyal  but  finally  alienated 
colony. 

I  have  said  that  Hawthorne  had  become  engaged  in 
about  his  thirty-fifth  year;  but  he  was  not  married  until 
1842.  Before  this  event  took  place  he  passed  through 
two  episodes,  which  (putting  his  falling  in  love  aside)  were 
much  the  most  important  things  that  had  yet  happened 
to  him.  They  interrupted  the  painful  monotony  of  his 
life,  and  brought  the  affairs  of  men  within  his  personal 
experience.  One  of  these  was,  moreover,  in  itself  a  curious 
and  interesting  chapter  of  observation,  and  it  fructified, 
in  Hawthorne's  memory,  in  one  of  his  best  productions. 
How  urgently  he  needed  at  this  time  to  be  drawn  within 
the  circle  of  social  accidents,  a  little  anecdote  related  by 
Mr.  Lathrop  in  connection  with  his  first  acquaintance  with 
the  young  lady  he  was  to  marry,  may  serve  as  an  example. 
This  young  lady  became  known  to  him  through  her  sis 
ter,  who  had  first  approached  him  as  an  admirer  of  the 


in.]  EARLY  WKITIXGS.  67 

Twice-Told  Tales  (as  to  the  authorship  of  which  she  had 
been  so  much  in  the  dark  as  to  have  attributed  it  first, 
conjecturally,  to  one  of  the  two  Miss  Hathornes) ;  and  the 
two  Miss  Peabodys,  desiring  to  see  more  of  the  charming 
writer,  caused  him  to  be  invited  to  a  species  of  conver 
sazione  at  the  house  of  one  of  their  friends,  at  which  they 
themselves  took  care  to  be  punctual.  Several  other  ladies, 
however,  were  as  punctual  as  they,  and  Hawthorne  pres 
ently  arriving,  and  seeing  a  bevy  of  admirers  where  he 
had  expected  but  three  or  four,  fell  into  a  state  of  agita 
tion,  which  is  vividly  described  by  his  biographer.  He 
"  stood  perfectly  motionless,  but  with  the  look  of  a  sylvan 
creature  on  the  point  of  fleeing  away.  ...  He  was  stricken 
with  dismay;  his  face  lost  colour  and  took  on  a  warm 
paleness,  .  .  .  his  agitation  was  very  great;  he  stood  by 
a  table,  and,  taking  up  some  small  object  that  lay  upon  it, 
he  found  his  hand  trembling  so  that  he  was  obliged  to 
lay  it  down."  It  was  desirable,  certainly,  that  something 
should  occur  to  break  the  spell  of  a  diffidence  that  might 
justly  be  called  morbid.  There  is  another  little  sentence 
dropped  by  Mr.  Lathrop  in  relation  to  this  period  of  Haw 
thorne's  life,  which  appears  to  me  worth  quoting,  though 
I  am  by  no  means  sure  that  it  will  seem  so  to  the  reader. 
It  has  a  very  simple  and  innocent  air,  but  to  a  person  not 
without  an  impression  of  the  early  days  of  "  culture "  in 
New  England  it  will  be  pregnant  with  historic  meaning. 
The  elder  Miss  Peabody,  who  afterwards  was  Hawthorne's 
sister-in-law,  and  who  acquired  later  in  life  a  very  honour 
able  American  fame  as  a  woman  of  benevolence,  of  learn 
ing,  and  of  literary  accomplishment,  had  invited  the  Miss 
Hathornes  to  come  to  her  house  for  the  evening,  and  to 
bring  with  them  their  brother,  whom  she  wished  to  thank 
for  his  beautiful  tales.  "  Entirely  to  her  surprise,"  says 


68  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

Mr.  Lathrop,  completing  thereby  his  picture  of  the  atti 
tude  of  this  remarkable  family  toward  society — "  entirely 
to  her  surprise  they  came.  She  herself  opened  the  door, 
and  there,  before  her,  between  his  sisters,  stood  a  splen 
didly  handsome  youth,  tall  and  strong,  with  no  appearance 
whatever  of  timidity,  but  instead  an  almost  fierce  deter 
mination  making  his  face  stern.  This  was  his  resource 
for  carrying  off  the  extreme  inward  tremor  which  he 
really  felt.  His  hostess  brought  out  Flaxman's  designs 
for  Dante,  just  received  from  Professor  Felton,  of  Harvard, 
and  the  party  made  an  evening's  entertainment  out  of 
them."  This  last  sentence  is  the  one  I  allude  to ;  and 
were  it  not  for  fear  of  appearing  too  fanciful,  I  should  say 
that  these  few  words  were,  to  the  initiated  mind,  an  un 
conscious  expression  of  the  lonely  frigidity  which  charac 
terised  most  attempts  at  social  recreation  in  the  New  Eng 
land  world  some  forty  years  ago.  There  was  at  that  time 
a  great  desire  for  culture,  a  great  interest  in  knowledge, 
in  art,  in  assthetics,  together  with  a  very  scanty  supply  of 
the  materials  for  such  pursuits.  Small  things  were  made 
to  do  large  service ;  and  there  is  something  even  touching 
in  the  solemnity  of  consideration  that  was  bestowed  by 
the  emancipated  New  England  conscience  upon  little  wan 
dering  books  and  prints,  little  echoes  and  rumours  of  ob 
servation  and  experience.  There  flourished  at  that  time 
in  Boston  a  very  remarkable  and  interesting  woman,  of 
whom  we  shall  have  more  to  say,  Miss  Margaret  Fuller  by 
name.  This  lady  was  the  apostle  of  culture,  of  intellectual 
curiosity ;  and  in  the  peculiarly  interesting  account  of  her 
life,  published  in  1852  by  Emerson  and  two  other  of  her 
friends,  there  are  pages  of  her  letters  and  diaries  which 
narrate  her  visits  to  the  Boston  Athenaeum,  and  the  emo 
tions  aroused  in  her  mind  by  turning  over  portfolios  of 


in.]  EARLY  WRITINGS.  69 

engravings.  These  emotions  were  ardent  and  passionate 
— could  hardly  have  been  more  so  had  she  been  prostrate 
with  contemplation  in  the  Sistine  Chapel  or  in  one  of  the 
chambers  of  the  Pitti  Palace.  The  only  analogy  I  can 
recall  to  this  earnestness  of  interest  in  great  works  of 
art  at  a  distance  from  them,  is  furnished  by  the  great 
Goethe's  elaborate  study  of  plaster-casts  and  pencil-draw 
ings  at  Weimar.  I  mention  Margaret  Fuller  here  because 
a  glimpse  of  her  state  of  mind — her  vivacity  of  desire  and 
poverty  of  knowledge — helps  to  define  the  situation.  The 
situation  lives  for  a  moment  in  those  few  words  of  Mr. 
Lathrop's.  The  initiated  mind,  as  I  have  ventured  to  call 
it,  has  a  vision  of  a  little  unadorned  parlour,  with  the 
snow-drifts  of  a'Massachusetts  winter  piled  up  about  its 
windows,  and  a  group  of  sensitive  and  serious  people,  mod 
est  votaries  of  opportunity,  fixing  their  eyes  upon  a  book- 
f  ul  of  Flaxman's  attenuated  outlines. 

At  the  beginning  of  the  year  1839  he  received,  through 
political  interest,  an  appointment  as  weigher  and  ganger 
in  the  Boston  Custom-house.  Mr.  Van  Buren  then  occu 
pied  the  Presidency,  and  it  appears  that  the  Democratic 
party,  whose  successful  candidate  he  had  been,  rather  took 
credit  for  the  patronage  it  had  bestowed  upon  literary 
men.  Hawthorne  was  a  Democrat,  and  apparently  a  zeal 
ous  one ;  even  in  later  years,  after  the  Whigs  had  vivified 
their  principles  by  the  adoption  of  the  Republican  plat 
form,  and  by  taking  up  an  honest  attitude  on  the  question 
of  slavery,  his  political  faith  never  wavered.  His  Demo 
cratic  sympathies  were  eminently  natural,  and  there  would 
have  been  an  incongruity  in  his  belonging  to  the  other 
party.  He  was  not  only  by  conviction,  but  personally 
and  by  association,  a  Democrat.  When  in  later  years  he 
found  himself  in  contact  writh  European  civilization,  he 


70  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

appears  to  have  become  conscious  of  a  good  deal  of  latent 
radicalism  in  his  disposition  ;  he  was  oppressed  with  the 
burden  of  antiquity  in  Europe,  and  he  found  himself  sigh 
ing  for  lightness  and  freshness  and  facility  of  change. 
But  these  things  are  relative  to  the  point  of  view,  and  in 
his  own  country  Hawthorne  cast  his  lot  with  the  party  of 
conservatism,  the  party  opposed  to  change  and  freshness. 
The  people  who  found  something  musty  and  mouldy  in 
his  literary  productions  would  have  regarded  this  quite 
as  a  matter  of  course ;  but  we  are  not  obliged  to  use 
invidious  epithets  in  describing  his  political  preferences. 
The  sentiment  that  attached  him  to  the  Democracy  was  a 
subtle  and  honourable  one,  and  the  author  of  an  attempt 
to  sketch  a  portrait  of  him  should  be  the  last  to  complain 
of  this  adjustment  of  his  sympathies.  It  falls  much  more 
smoothly  into  his  reader's  conception  of  him  than  any 
other  would  do ;  and  if  he  had  had  the  perversity  to  be 
a  Republican,  I  am  afraid  our  ingenuity  would  have  been 
considerably  taxed  in  devising  a  proper  explanation  of  the 
circumstance.  At  any  rate,  the  Democrats  gave  him  a 
small  post  in  the  Boston  Custom-house,  to  which  an  an- . 
nual  salary  of  $1,200  was  attached,  and  Hawthorne  ap 
pears  at  first  to  have  joyously  welcomed  the  gift.  The 
duties  of  the  office  were  not  very  congruous  to  the  genius 
of  a  man  of  fancy ;  but  it  had  the  advantage  that  it  broke 
the  spell  of  his  cursed  solitude,  as  he  called  it,  drew  him 
away  from  Salem,  and  threw  him,  comparatively  speaking, 
into  the  world.  The  first  volume  of  the  American  Note- 
Books  contains  some  extracts  from  letters  written  during  his 
tenure  of  this  modest  office,  which  indicate  sufficiently  that 
his  occupations  cannot  have  been  intrinsically  gratifying. 

"  I  have  been  measuring  coal  all  day,"  he  writes,  during 


in.]  EARLY  WRITINGS.  ?1 

the  winter  of  1840,  "  on  board  of  a  black  little  British 
schooner,  in  a  dismal  dock  at  the  north  end  of  the  city. 
Most  of  the  time  I  paced  the  deck  to  keep  myself  warm ; 
for  the  wind  (north-east,  I  believe)  blew  up  through  the 
dock  as  if  it  had  been  the  pipe  of  a  pair  of  bellows.  The 
vessel  lying  deep  between  two  wharves,  there  was  no  more 
delightful  prospect,  on  the  right  hand  and  on  the  left,  than 
the  posts  and  timbers,  half  immersed  in  the  water  and  cov 
ered  with  ice,  which  the  rising  and  falling  of  successive  tides 
had  left  upon  them,  so  that  they  looked  like  immense  icicles. 
Across  the  water,  however,  not  more  than  half  a  mile  off, 
appeared  the  Bunker's  Hill  Monument,  and,  what  interested 
me  considerably  more,  a  church-steeple,  with  the  dial  of  a 
clock  upon  it,  whereby  I  was  enabled  to  measure  the  march 
of  the  weary  hours.  Sometimes  I  descended  into  the  dirty 
little  cabin  of  the  schooner,  and  warmed  myself  by  a  red-hot 
stove,  among  biscuit-barrels,  pots  and  kettles,  sea-chests,  and 
innumerable  lumber  of  all  sorts — my  olfactories  meanwhile 
being  greatly  refreshed  with  the  odour  of  a  pipe,  which  the 
captain,  or  some  one  of  his  crew,  was  smoking.  But  at  last 
came  the  sunset,. with  delicate  clouds,  and  a  purple  light 
upon  the  islands ;  and  I  blessed  it,  because  it  was  the  signal 
of  my  release." 

A  worse  man  than  Hawthorne  would  have  measured 
coal  quite  as  well ;  and  of  all  the  dismal  tasks  to  which  an 
unremunerated  imagination  has  ever  had  to  accommodate 
itself,  I  remember  none  more  sordid  than  the  business 
depicted  in  the  foregoing  lines.  "I  pray,"  he  writes, 
some  weeks  later,  "that  in  one  year  more  I  may  find 
some  way  of  escaping  from  this  unblest  Custom-house; 
for  it  is  a  very  grievous  thraldom.  I  do  detest  all  offices  ; 
all,  at  least,  that  are  held  on  a  political  tenure,  and  I  want 
nothing  to  do  with  politicians.  Their  hearts  wither  away, 
and  die  out  of  their  bodies.  Their  consciences  are  turned 


72  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

to  india-rubber,  or  to  some  substance  as  black  as  that,  and 
which  will  stretch  as  much.  One  thing,  if  no  more,  I  have 
gained  by  my  Custom-house  experience — to  know  a  poli 
tician.  It  is  a  knowledge  which  no  previous  thought  or 
power  of  sympathy  could  have  taught  me ;  because  the 
animal,  or  the  machine,  rather,  is  not  in  nature."  A  few 
days  later  he  goes  on  in  the  same  strain : — 

"  I  do  not  think  it  is  the  doom  laid  upon  me  of  murdering 
so  many  of  the  brightest  hours  of  the  day  at  the  Custom 
house  that  makes  such  havoc  with  my  wits,  for  here  I  am 
again  trying  to  write  worthily,  .  .  .  yet  with  a  sense  as  if  all 
the  noblest  part  of  man  had  been  left  out  of  my  composition, 
or  had  decayed  out  of  it  since  my  nature  was  given  to  my 
own  keeping.  .  .  .  Never  comes  any  bird  of  Paradise  into 
that  dismal  region.  A  salt  or  even  a  coal-ship  is  ten  mill 
ion  times  preferable ;  for  there  the  sky  is  above  me,  and  the 
fresh  breeze  around  me ;  and  my  thoughts,  having  hardly 
anything  to  do  with  my  occupation,  are  as  free  as  air.  Nev^ 
ertheless  ...  it  is  only  once  in  a  while  that  the  image  and 
desire  of  a  better  and  happier  life  makes  me  feel  the  iron  of 
my  chain ;  for  after  all  a  human  spirit  may  find  no  insuffi 
ciency  of  food  for  it,  even  in  the  Custom-house.  And  with 
such  materials  as  these  I  do  think  and  feel  and  learn  things 
that  are  worth  knowing,  and  which  I  should  not  know  unless 
I  had  learned  them  there ;  so  that  the  present  position  of  my 
life  shall  not  be  quite  left  out  of  the  sum  of  rny  real  exist 
ence.  ...  It  is  good  for  me,  on  many  accounts,  that  my  life 
has  had  this  passage  in  it.  I  know  much  more  than  I  did  a 
year  ago.  I  have  a  stronger  sense  of  power  to  act  as  a  man 
among  men.  I  have  gained  worldly  wisdom,  and  wisdom, 
also,  that  is  not  altogether  of  this  world.  And  when  I  quit 
this  earthly  career  where  I  am  now  buried,  nothing  will  cling 
to  me  that  ought  to  be  left  behind/  Men  will  not  perceive,  I 
trust,  by  my  look,  or  the  tenor  of  my  thoughts  and  feelings, 
that  I  have  been  a  Custom-house  officer." 


in.]  EARLY  WRITINGS.  73 

lie  says,  writing  shortly  afterwards,  that  "  when  I  shall 
be  free  again,  I  will  enjoy  all  things  with  the  fresh  sim 
plicity  of  a  child  of  five  years  old.  I  shall  grow  young 
again,  made  all  over  anew.  I  will  go  forth  and  stand  in 
a  summer  shower,  and  all  the  worldly  dust  that  has  col 
lected  on  me  shall  be  washed  away  at  once,  and  my  heart 
will  be  like  a  bank  of  fresh  flowers  for  the  weary  to  rest 
upon." 

This  forecast  of  his  destiny  was  sufficiently  exact.  A 
year  later,  in  April,  1841,  he  went  to  take  up  his  abode 
in  the  socialistic  community  of  Brook  Farm.  Here  he 
found  himself  among  fields  and  flowers  and  other  natural 
products,  as  well  as  among  many  products  that  could  not 
very  justly  be  called  natural.  He  was  exposed  to  summer 
showers  in  plenty ;  and  his  personal  associations  were  as 
different  as  possible  from  those  he  had  encountered  in  fis 
cal  circles.  He  made  acquaintance  with  Transcendental 
ism  and  the  Transcendentalists. 
4* 


CHAPTER  IV. 

BROOK    FARM    AND    CONCORD. 

THE  history  of  the  little  industrial  and  intellectual  asso 
ciation  which  formed  itself  at  this  time  in  one  of  the  sub 
urbs  of  Boston  has  not,  to  my  knowledge,  been  written  ; 
though  it  is  assuredly  a  curious  and  interesting  chapter 
in  the  domestic  annals  of  New  England.  It  would,  of 
course,  be  easy  to  overrate  the  importance  of  this  ingen 
ious  attempt  of  a  few  speculative  persons  to  improve  the 
outlook  of  mankind.  The  experiment  came  and  went 
very  rapidly  and  quietly,  leaving  very  few  traces  behind 
it.  It  became  simply  a  charming  personal  reminiscence 
for  the  small  number  of  amiable  enthusiasts  who  had  had 
a  hand  in  it.  There  were  degrees  of  enthusiasm,  and  I 
suppose  there  were  degrees  of  amiability ;  but  a  certain 
generous  brightness  of  hope  and  freshness  of  conviction 
pervaded  the  whole  undertaking,  and  rendered  'it,  morally 
speaking,  important  to  an  extent  of  which  any  heed  that 
the  world  in  general  ever  gave  to  it  is  an  insufficient  meas 
ure.  Of  course  it  would  be  a  great  mistake  to  represent 
the  episode  of  Brook  Farm  as  directly  related  to  the  man 
ners  and  morals  of  the  New  England  world  in  general — 
and  in  especial  to  those  of  the  prosperous,  opulent,  com 
fortable  part  of  it.  The  thing  was  the  experiment  of  a 
coterie  —  it  was  unusual,  unfashionable,  unsuccessful.  It 


CHAP,  iv.]  BROOK  FARM  AND  CONCORD.  75 

was,  as  would  then  have  been  said,  an  amusement  of  the 
Transcendentalists  —  a  harmless  effusion  of  Radicalism. 
The  Transcendentalists  were  not,  after  all,  very  numerous, 
and  the  Radicals  were  by  no  means  of  the  vivid  tinge  of 
those  of  our  own  day.  I  have  said  that  the  Brook  Farm 
community  left  no  traces  behind  it  that  the  world  in  gen 
eral  can  appreciate  ;  I  should  rather  say  that  the  only  trace 
is  a  short  novel,  of  which  the  principal  merits  reside  in  its 
qualities  of  difference  from  the  affair  itself.  The  Blithe- 
dale  Romance  is  the  main  result  of  Brook  Farm ;  but  The 
Blithedale  Romance  was,  very  properly,  never  recognised 
by  the  Brook  Farmers  as  an  accurate  portrait  of  their 
little  colony. 

Nevertheless,  in  a  society  as  to  which  the  more  frequent 
complaint  is  that  it  is  monotonous,  that  it  lacks  variety  of 
incident  and  of  type,  the  episode,  our  own  business  with 
which  is  simply  that  it  was  the  cause  of  Hawthorne's  writ 
ing  an  admirable  tale,  might  be  welcomed  as  a  picturesque 
variation.  At  the  same  time,  if  we  do  not  exaggerate  its 
proportions,  it  may  seem  to  contain  a  fund  of  illustration 
as  to  that  phase  of  human  life  with  which  our  author's 
own  history  mingled  itself.  The  most  graceful  account  of 
the  origin  of  Brook  Farm  is  probably  to  be  found  in  these 
words  of  one  of  the  biographers  of  Margaret  Fuller :  "  In 
Boston  and  its  vicinity,  several  friends,  for  whose  character 
Margaret  felt  the  highest  honour,  were  earnestly  consid 
ering  the  possibility  of  making  such  industrial,  social,  and 
educational  arrangements  as  would  simplify  economies, 
combine  leisure  for  study  with  healthful  and  honest  toil, 
avert  unjust  collisions  of  caste,  equalise  refinements,  awaken 
generous  affections,  diffuse  courtesy,  and  sweeten  and  sanc 
tify  life  as  a  whole."  The  reader  will  perceive  that  this 
was  a  liberal  scheme,  and  that  if  the  experiment  failed,  the 


76  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

greater  was  the  pity.  The  writer  goes  on  to  say  that  a 
gentleman,  who  afterwards  distinguished  himself  in  litera 
ture  (he  had  begun  by  being  a  clergyman),  "  convinced  by 
his  experience  in  a  faithful  ministry  that  the  need  was  ur 
gent  for  a  thorough  application  of  the  professed  principles 
of  Fraternity  to  actual  relations,  was  about  staking  his  all 
of  fortune,  reputation,  and  influence  in  an  attempt  to  organ 
ise  a  joint-stock  company  at  Brook  Farm."  As  Margaret 
Fuller  passes  for  having  suggested  to  Hawthorne  the  figure 
of  Zenobia  in  The  Blithedale  Romance,  and  as  she  is  prob 
ably,  with  one%  exception,  the  person  connected  with  the 
affair  who,  after  Hawthorne,  offered  most  of  what  is  called 
a  personality  to  the  world,  I  may  venture  to  quote  a  few 
more  passages  from  her  Memoirs — a  curious,  in  some  points 
of  view  almost  a  grotesque,  and  yet,  on  the  whole,  as  I  have 
said,  an  extremely  interesting  book.  It  was  a  strange  his 
tory  and  a  strange  destiny,  that  of  this  brilliant,  restless, 
and  unhappy  woman  —  this  ardent  New  Englander,  this 
impassioned  Yankee,  who  occupied  so  large  a  place  in  the 
thoughts,  the  lives,  the  affections,  of  an  intelligent  and  ap 
preciative  society,  and  yet  left  behind  her  nothing  but  the 
memory  of  a  memory.  Her  function,  her  reputation,  were 
singular,  and  not  altogether  reassuring :  she  was  a  talker ; 
she  was  the  talker ;  she  was  the  genius  of  talk.  She  had  a 
magnificent,  though  by  no  means  an  unmitigated,  egotism  ; 
and  in  some  of  her  utterances  it  is  difficult  to  say  whether 
pride  or  humility  prevails — as,  for  instance,  when  she  writes 
that  she  feels  "  that  there  is  plenty  of  room  in  the  Universe 
for  my  faults,  and  as  if  I  could  not  spend  time  in  thinking 
of  them  when  so  many  things  interest  me  more."  She 
has  left  the  same  sort  of  reputation  as  a  great  actress. 
Some  of  her  writing  has  extreme  beauty,  almost  all  of  it 
has  a  real  interest ;  but  her  value,  her  activity,  her  sway  (I 


iv.]         BROOK  FARM  AND  CONCORD.         77 

am  not  sure  that  one  can  say  her  charm),  were  personal  and 
practical.  She  went  to  Europe,  expanded  to  new  desires 
and  interests,  and,  very  poor  herself,  married  an  impover 
ished  Italian  nobleman.  Then,  with  her  husband  and  child, 
she  embarked  to  return  to  her  own  country,  and  was  lost 
at  sea  in  a  terrible  storm,  within  sight  of  its  coasts.  Her 
tragical  death  combined  with  many  of  the  elements  of  her 
life  to  convert  her  memory  into  a  sort  of  legend,  so  that 
the  people  who  had  known  her  well  grew  at  last  to  be  en 
vied  by  later  comers.  Hawthorne  does  not  appear  to  have 
been  intimate  with  her ;  on  the  contrary,  I  find  such  an 
entry  ass  this  in  the  American  Note-Books  in  1841 :  "I  was 
invited  to  dine  at  Mr.  Bancroft's  yesterday,  with  Miss  Mar 
garet  Fuller ;  but  Providence  had  given  me  some  business 
to  do ;  for  which  I  was  very  thankful !"  It  is  true  that, 
later,  the  lady  is  the  subject  of  one  or  two  allusions  of  a 
gentler  cast.  One  of  them,  indeed,  is  so  pretty  as  to  be 
worth  quoting  : —  * 

"After  leaving  the  book  at  Mr.  Emerson's,  I  returned 
through  the  woods,  and,  entering  Sleepy  Hollow,  I  perceived 
a  lady  reclining  near  the  path  which  bends  along  its  verge. 
It  was  Margaret  herself.  She  had  been  there  the  whole  after 
noon,  meditating  or  reading,  for  she  had  a  book  in  her  hand, 
with  some  strange  title  which  I  did  not  understand  and  have 
forgotten.  She  said  that  nobody  had  broken  her  solitude,  and 
was  just  giving  utterance  to  a  theory  that  no  inhabitant  of 
Concord  ever  visited  Sleepy  Hollow,  when  we  saw  a  group 
of  people  entering  the  sacred  precincts.  Most  of  them  fol 
lowed  a  path  which  led  them  away  from  us;  but  an  old  man 
passed  near  us,  and  smiled  to  see  Margaret  reclining  on  the 
ground  and  me  standing  by  her  side.  He  made  some  remark 
upon  the  beauty  of  the  afternoon,  and  withdrew  himself  into 
the  shadow  of  the  wood.  Then  we  talked  about  autumn, 
and  about  the  pleasures  of  being  lost  in  the  woods,  and  about 


78  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

the  crows,  whose  voices  Margaret  had  heard ;  and  about  the 
experiences  of  early  childhood,  whose  influence  remains  upon 
the  character  after  the  recollection  of  them  has  passed  away; 
and  about  the  sight  of  mountains  from  a  distance,  and  the 
view  from  their  summits;  and  about  other  matters  of  high 
and  low  philosophy." 

It  is  safe  to  assume  that  Hawthorne  could  not,  on  the 
whole,  have  had  a  high  relish  for  the  very  positive  person 
ality  of  this  accomplished  and  argumentative  woman,  in 
whose  intellect  high  noon  seemed  ever  to  reign,  as  twilight 
did  in  his  own.  He  must  have  been  struck  with  the  glare 
of  her  understanding,  and,  mentally  speaking,  have  scowled 
and  blinked  a  good  deal  in  conversation  with  her.  But  it 
is  tolerably  manifest,  nevertheless,  that  she  was,  in  his  im 
agination,  the  starting-point  of  the  figure  of  Zenobia ;  and 
Zenobia  is,  to  my  sense,  his  only  very  definite  attempt  at 
the  representation  of  a  character.  The  portrait  is  full  of 
alteration  and  embellishment ;  but  it  has  a  greater  reality, 
a  greater  abundance  of  detail,  than  any  of  his  other  fig 
ures,  and  the  reality  was  a  memory  of  the  lady  whom  he 
had  encountered  in  the  Roxbury  pastoral  or  among  the 
wood-walks  of  Concord,  with  strange  books  in  her  hand 
and  eloquent  discourse  on  her  lips.  The  Blithedale  Ro 
mance  was  written  just  after  her  unhappy  death,  when  the 
reverberation  of  her  talk  would  lose  much  of  its  harsh 
ness.  In  fact,  however,  very  much  the  same  qualities  that 
made  Hawthorne  a  Democrat  in  politics — his  contempla 
tive  turn  and  absence  of  a  keen  perception  of  abuses,  his 
taste  for  old  ideals,  and  loitering  paces,  and  muffled  tones 
— would  operate  to  keep  him  out  of  active  sympathy  with 
a  woman  of  the  so-called  progressive  type.  We  may  be 
sure  that  in  women  his  taste  was  conservative. 

It  seems  odd,  as  Ms  biographer  says,  "that  the  least 


iv.]         BROOK  FARM  AND  CONCORD.          79 

gregarious  of  men  should  have  been  drawn  into  a  social 
istic  community ;"  but  although  it  is  apparent  that  Haw 
thorne  went  to  Brook  Farm  without  any  great  Transcen 
dental  fervour,  yet  he  had  various  good  reasons  for  cast 
ing  his  lot  in  this  would-be  happy  family.  He  was  as  yet 
unable  to  marry,  but  he  naturally  wished  to  do  so  as  speed 
ily  as  possible,  and  there  was  a  prospect  that  Brook  Farm 
would  prove  an  economical  residence.  And  then  it  is  only 
fair  to  believe  that  Hawthorne  was  interested  in  the  ex 
periment  ;  and  that,  though  he  was  not  a  Transcendental- 
ist,  an  Abolitionist,  or  a  Fourierite,  as  his  companions  were 
in  some  degree  or  other  likely  to  be,  he  was  willing,  as  a 
generous  and  unoccupied  young  man,  to  lend  a  hand  in 
any  reasonable  scheme  for  helping  people  to  live  together 
on  better  terms  than  the  common.  The  Brook  Farm 
scheme  was,  as  such  things  go,  a  reasonable  one ;  it  was 
devised  and  carried  out  by  shrewd  and  sober-minded  New 
Englanders,  who  were  careful  to  place  economy  first  and 
idealism  afterwards,  and  who  were  not  afflicted  with  a 
Gallic  passion  for  completeness  of  theory.  There  were 
no  formulas,  doctrines,  dogmas ;  there  was  no  interference 
whatever  with  private  life  or  individual  habits,  and  not  the 
faintest  adumbration  of  a  rearrangement  of  that  difficult 
business  known  as  the  relations  of  the  sexes.  The  rela 
tions  of  the  sexes  were  neither  more  nor  less  than  what 
they  usually  are  in  American  life,  excellent ;  and  in  such 
particulars  the  scheme  was  thoroughly  conservative  and  ir 
reproachable.  Its  main  characteristic  was  that  each  indi 
vidual  concerned  in  it  should  do  a  part  of  the  work  nec 
essary  for  keeping  the  whole  machine  going.  He  could 
choose  his  work,  and  he  could  live  as  he  liked;  it  was 
hoped,  but  it  was  by  no  means  demanded,  that  he  would 
make  himself  agreeable,  like  a  gentleman  invited  to  a  din- 


80  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

ner-party.  Allowing,  however,  for  everything  that  was  a 
concession  to  worldly  traditions  and  to  the  laxity  of  man's 
nature,  there  must  have  been  in  the  enterprise  a  good  deal 
of  a  certain  freshness  and  purity  of  spirit,  of  a  certain  no 
ble  credulity  and  faith  in  the  perfectibility  of  man,  which 
it  would  have  been  easier  to  find  in  Boston  in  the  year 
1840,  than  in  London  five-and-thirty  years  later.  If  that 
was  the  era  of  Transcendentalism,  Transcendentalism  could 
only  have  sprouted  in  the  soil  peculiar  to  the  general  lo 
cality  of  which  I  speak — the  soil  of  the  old  New  England 
morality,  gently  raked  and  refreshed  by  an  imported  cult 
ure.  The  Transcendentalists  read  a  great  deal  of  French 
and  German,  made  themselves  intimate  with  George  Sand 
and  Goethe,  and  many  other  writers ;  but  the  strong  and 
deep  New  England  conscience  accompanied  them  on  all 
their  intellectual  excursions,  and  there  never  was  a  so- 
called  "  movement "  that  embodied  itself,  on  the  whole,  in 
fewer  eccentricities  of  conduct,  or  that  borrowed  a  smaller 
license  in  private  deportment.  Henry  Thoreau,  a  delight 
ful  writer,  went  to  live  in  the  woods ;  but  Henry  Thoreau 
was  essentially  a  sylvan  personage,  and  would  not  have 
been,  however  the  fashion  of  his  time  might  have  turned,  a 
man  about  town.  The  brothers  and  sisters  at  Brook  Farm 
ploughed  the  fields  and  milked  the  cows  ;  but  I  think  that 
an  observer  from  another  clime  and  society  would  have 
been  much  more  struck  with  their  spirit  of  conformity 
than  with  their  dereglements.  Their  ardour  was  a  moral 
ardour,  and  the  lightest  breath  of  scandal  never  rested 
upon  them,  or  upon  any  phase  of  Transcendentalism. 

A  biographer  of  Hawthorne  might  well  regret  that  his 
hero  had  not  been  more  mixed  up  with  the  reforming 
and  free-thinking  class,  so  that  he  might  find  a  pretext 
for  writing  a  chapter  upon  the  state  of  Boston  society 


iv.]      BROOK  FARM:  AND  CONCORD.       si 

forty  years  ago.  A  needful  warrant  for  such  regret  should 
be,  properly,  that  the  biographer's  own  personal  reminis 
cences  should  stretch  back  to  that  period  and  to  the  per 
sons  who  animated  it.  This  would  be  a  guarantee  of  ful 
ness  of  knowledge  and,  presumably,  of  kindness  of  tone. 
It  is  difficult  to  see,  indeed,  how  the  generation  of  which 
Hawthorne  has  given  us,  in  Blithedale,  a  few  portraits, 
should  not,  at  this  time  of  day,  be  spoken  of  very  tender 
ly  and  sympathetically.  If  irony  enter  into  the  allusion,  it 
should  be  of  the  lightest  and  gentlest.  Certainly,  for  a  brief 
and  imperfect  chronicler  of  these  things,  a  writer  just  touch 
ing  them  as  he  passes,  and  who  has  not  the  advantage  of 
having  been  a  contemporary,  there  is  only  one  possible  tone. 
The  compiler  of  these  pages,  though  his  recollections  date 
only  from  a  later  period,  has  a  memory  of  a  certain  num 
ber  of  persons  who  had  been  intimately  connected,  as  Haw 
thorne  was  not,  with  the  agitations  of  that  interesting  time. 
Something  of  its  interest  adhered  to  them  still — something 
of  its  aroma  clung  to  their  garments;  there  was  some 
thing  about  them  which  seemed  to  say  that  when  they  were 
young  and  enthusiastic,  they  had  been  initiated  into  moral 
mysteries,  they  had  played  at  a  wonderful  game.  Their 
usual  mark  (it  is  true  I  can  think  of  exceptions)  was  that 
they  seemed  excellently  good.  They  appeared  unstained 
by  the  world,  unfamiliar  with  worldly  desires  and  stand 
ards,  and  with  those  various  forms  of  human  depravity 
which  flourish  in  some  high  phases  of  civilization;  in 
clined  to  simple  and  democratic  ways,  destitute  of  preten 
sions  and  affectations,  of  jealousies,  of  cynicisms,  of  snob 
bishness.  This  little  epoch  of  fermentation  has  three  or 
four  drawbacks  for  the  critics — drawbacks,  however,  that 
may  be  overlooked  by  a  person  for  whom  it  has  an  interest 
of  association.  It  bore,  intellectually,  the  stamp  of  provin- 


82  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

cialism  ;  it  was  a  beginning  without  a  fruition,  a  dawn  with 
out  a  noon ;  and  it  produced,  with  a  single  exception,  no 
great  talents.  It  produced  a  great  deal  of  writing,  but  (al 
ways  putting  Hawthorne  aside,  as  a  contemporary  but  not 
a  sharer)  only  one  writer  in  whom  the  world  at  large  has 
interested  itself.  The  situation  was  summed  up  and  trans 
figured  in  the  admirable  and  exquisite  Emerson.  He  ex 
pressed  all  that  it  contained,  and  a  good  deal  more,  doubt 
less,  besides ;  he  was  the  man  of  genius  of  the  moment ; 
he  was  the  Transcendentalist  par  excellence.  Emerson  ex 
pressed,  before  all  things,  as  was  extremely  natural  at  the 
hour  and  in  the  place,  the  value  and  importance  of  the  in 
dividual,  the  duty  of  making  the  most  of  one's  self,  of  liv 
ing  by  one's  own  personal  light,  and  carrying  out  one's 
own  disposition.  He  reflected  with  beautiful  irony  upon 
the  exquisite  impudence  of  those  institutions  which  claim 
to  have  appropriated  the  truth  and  to  dole  it  out,  in  propor 
tionate  morsels,  in  exchange  for  a  subscription.  He  talked 
about  the  beauty  and  dignity  of  life,  and  about  every  one 
who  is  born  into  the  world  being  born  to  the  whole,  having 
an  interest  and  a  stake  in  the  whole.  He  said  "  all  that 
is  clearly  due  to-day  is  not  to  lie,"  and  a  great  many  other 
things  which  it  would  be  still  easier  to  present  in  a  ridic 
ulous  light.  He  insisted  upon  sincerity  and  independence 
and  spontaneity,  upon  acting  in  harmony  with  one's  nat 
ure,  and  not  conforming  and  compromising  for  the  sake 
of  being  more  comfortable.  He  urged  that  a  man  should 
await  his  call,  his  finding  the  thing  to  do  which  he  should 
really  believe  in  doing,  and  not  be  urged  by  the  world's 
opinion  to  do  simply  the  world's  work.  "  If  no  call  should 
come  for  years,  for  centuries,  then  I  know  that  the  want  of 
the  Universe  is  the  attestation  of  faith  by  my  abstinence. . . . 
If  I  cannot  work,  at  least  I  need  not  lie."  The  doctrine 


iv.]         BROOK  FARM  AND  CONCORD.          83 

of  the  supremacy  of  the  individual  to  himself,  of  his  orig 
inality,  and,  as  regards  his  own  character,  unique  quality, 
must  have  had  a  great  charm  for  people  living  in  a  socie 
ty  in  which  introspection — thanks  to  the  want  of  other  en 
tertainment — played  almost  the  part  of  a  social  resource. 

In  the  United  States,  in  those  days,  there  were  no  great 
things  to  look  out  at  (save  forests  and  rivers) ;  life  was 
not  in  the  least  spectacular ;  society  was  not  brilliant ; 
the  country  was  given  up  to  a  great  material  prosperity,  a 
homely  bourgeois  activity,  a  diffusion  of  primary  education 
and  the  common  luxuries.  There  was,  therefore,  among 
the  cultivated  classes,  much  relish  for  the  utterances  of  a 
writer  who  would  help  one  to  take  a  picturesque  view  of 
one's  internal  responsibilities,  and  to  find  in  the  landscape 
of  the  soul  all  sorts  of  fine  sunrise  and  moonlight  effects. 
"Meantime,  while  the  doors  of  the  temple  stand  open, 
night  and  day,  before  every  man,  and  the  oracles  of  this 
truth  cease  never,  it  is  guarded  by  one  stern  condition ; 
this,  namely — it-  is  an  intuition.  It  cannot  be  received  at 
second  hand.  Truly  speaking,  it  is  not  instruction  but 
provocation  that  I  can  receive  from  another  soul."  To 
make  one's  self  so  much  more  interesting  would  help  to 
make  life  interesting,  and  life  was  probably,  to  many  of 
this  aspiring  congregation,  a  dream  of  freedom  and  forti 
tude.  There  were  faulty  parts  in  the  Emersonian  philoso 
phy  ;  but  the  general  tone  was  magnificent ;  and  I  can  ea 
sily  believe  that,  coming  when  it  did  and  where  it  did,  it 
should  have  been  drunk  in  by  a  great  many  fine  moral  ap 
petites  with  a  sense  of  intoxication.  One  envies,  even,  I 
will  not  say  the  illusions,  of  that  keenly  sentient  period, 
but  the  convictions  and  interests — the  moral  passion.  One 
certainly  envies  the  privilege  of  having  heard  the  finest  of 
Emerson's  orations  poured  forth  in  their  early  newness. 


84  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

They  were  the  most  poetical,  the  most  beautiful  produc 
tions  of  the  American  mind,  and  they  were  thoroughly 
local  and  national.  They  had  a  music  and  a  magic,  and 
when  one  remembers  the  remarkable  charm  of  the  speaker, 
the  beautiful  modulation  of  his  utterance,  one  regrets  in 
especial  that  one  might  not  have  been  present  on  a  certain 
occasion  which  made  a  sensation,  an  era — the  delivery  of 
an  address  to  the  Divinity  School  of  Harvard  University, 
on  a  summer  evening  in  1838.  In  the  light,  fresh  Amer 
ican  air,  unthickened  and  undarkened  by  customs  and  in 
stitutions  established,  these  things,  as  the  phrase  is,  told. 

Hawthorne  appears,  like  his  own  Miles  Coverdale,  to 
have  arrived  at  Brook  Farm  in  the  midst  of  one  of  those 
April  snow-storms  which,  during  the  New  England  spring*, 
occasionally  diversify  the  inaction  of  the  vernal  process. 
Miles  Coverdale,  in  The  Blithedale  Romance,  is  evidently 
as  much  Hawthorne  as  he  is  any  one  else  in  particular. 
He  is,  indeed,  not  very  markedly  any  one,  unless  it  be  the 
spectator,  the  observer ;  his  chief  identity  lies  in  his  suc 
cess  in  looking  at  things  objectively,  and  spinning  uncom- 
municated  fancies  about  them.  This,  indeed,  was  the  part 
that  Hawthorne  played  socially  in  the  little  community  at 
West  Koxbury.  His  biographer  describes  him  as  sitting 
"  silently,  hour  after  hour,  in  the  broad,  old-fashioned  hall 
of  the  house,  where  he  could  listen  almost  unseen  to  the 
chat  and  merriment  of  the  young  people,  himself  almost 
always  holding  a  book  before  him,  but  seldom  turning  the 
leaves."  He  put  his  hand  to  the  plough,  and  supported 
himself  and  the  community,  as  they  were  all  supposed  to 
do,  by  his  labour;  but  he  contributed  little  to  the  hum  of 
voices.  Some  of  his  companions,  either  then  or  after 
wards,  took,  I  believe,  rather  a  gruesome  view  of  his  want 
of  articulate  enthusiasm,  and  accused  him  of  coming  to 


iv.]         BROOK  FARM  AXD  CONCORD.          85 

the  place  as  a  sort  of  intellectual  vampire,  for  purely  psy 
chological  purposes.  He  sat  in  a  corner,  they  declared, 
and  watched  the  inmates  when  they  were  off  their  guard, 
analysing  their  characters,  and  dissecting  the  amiable  ar 
dour,  the  magnanimous  illusions,  which  he  was  too  cold 
blooded  to  share.  In  so  far  as  this  account  of  Hawthorne's 
attitude  was  a  complaint,  it  was  a  singularly  childish  one. 
If  he  was  at  Brook  Farm  without  being  of  it,  this  is  a  very 
fortunate  circumstance  from  the  point  of  view  of  poster 
ity,  who  would  have  preserved  but  a  slender  memory  of 
the  affair  if  our  author's  fine  novel  had  not  kept  the  topic 
open.  The  complaint  is,  indeed,  almost  so  ungrateful  a 
one  as  to  make  us  regret  that  the  author's  fellow-commu 
nists  came  off  so  easily.  They  certainly  would  not  have 
done  so  if  the  author  of  Blithedale  had  been  more  of  a 
satirist.  Certainly,  if  Hawthorne  was  an  observer,  he  was 
a  very  harmless  one ;  and  when  one  thinks  of  the  queer 
specimens  of  the  reforming  genus  with  which  he  must 
have  been  surrounded,  one  almost  wishes  that,  for  our  en 
tertainment,  he  had  given  his  old  companions  something 
to  complain  of  in  earnest.  There  is  no  satire  whatever  in 
the  Romance ;  the  quality  is  almost  conspicuous  by  its 
absence.  Of  portraits  there  are  only  two ;  there  is  no 
sketching  of  odd  figures — no  reproduction  of  strange  types 
of  radicalism  ;  the  human  background  is  left  vague.  Haw 
thorne  was  not  a  satirist,  and  if  at  Brook  Farm  he  was, 
according  to  his  habit,  a  good  deal  of  a  mild  sceptic,  his 
scepticism  was  exercised  much  more  in  the  interest  of 
fancy  than  in  that  of  reality. 

There  must  have  been  something  pleasantly  bucolic  and 
pastoral  in  the  habits  of  the  place  during  the  fine  New 
England  summer;  but  we  have  no  retrospective  envy  of 
the  denizens  of  Brook  Farm  in  that  other  season  which,  as 


86  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

Hawthorne  somewhere  says,  leaves  in  those  regions  "  so 
large  a  blank — so  melancholy  a  death-spot  —  in  lives  so 
brief  that  they  ought  to  be  all  summer-time."  "  Of  a  sum 
mer  night,  when  the  moon  was  full,"  says  Mr.  Lathrop, 
"  they  lit  no  lamps,  but  sat  grouped  in  the  light  and  shad 
ow,  while  sundry  of  the  younger  men  sang  old  ballads,  or 
joined  Tom  Moore's  songs  to  operatic  airs.  On  other 
nights  there  would  be  an  original  essay  or  poem  read 
aloud,  or  else  a  play  of  Shakspeare,  with  the  parts  distrib 
uted  to  different  members;  and  these  amusements  failing, 
some  interesting  discussion  was  likely  to  take  their  place. 
Occasionally,  in  the  dramatic  season,  large  delegations 
from  the  farm  would  drive  into  Boston,  in  carriages  and 
wagons,  to  the  opera  or  the  play.  Sometimes,  too,  the 
young  women  sang  as  they  washed  the  dishes  in  the  Hive ; 
and  the  youthful  yeomen  of  the  society  came  in  and  help 
ed  them  with  their  work.  The  men  wore  blouses  of  a 
checked  or  plaided  stuff,  belted  at  the  waist,  with  a  broad 
collar  folding  down  about  the  throat,  and  rough  straw 
hats ;  the  women,  usually,  simple  calico  gowns  and  hats." 
All  this  sounds  delightfully  Arcadian  and  innocent,  and  it 
is  certain  that  there  was  something  peculiar  to  the  clime 
and  race  in  some  of  the  features  of  such  a  life ;  in  the 
free,  frank,  and  stainless  companionship  of  young  men  and 
maidens,  in  the  mixture  of  manual  labour  and  intellectual 
flights  —  dish- washing  and  aBsthetics,  wood  -chopping  and 
philosophy.  Wordsworth's  "  plain  living  and  high  think 
ing"  were  made  actual.  Some  passages  in  Margaret  Ful 
ler's  journals  throw  plenty  of  light  on  this.  (It  must  be 
premised  that  she  was  at  Brook  Farm  as  an  occasional 
visitor ;  not  as  a  labourer  in  the  Hive.) 

"  All  Saturday  I  was  off  in  the  woods.    In  the  evening  we 


iv.]         BROOK  FARM  AND  COXCORD.          87 

had  a  general  conversation,  opened  by  me,  upon  Education, 
in  its  largest  sense,  and  on  what  we  can  do  for  ourselves  and 
others.  I  took  my  usual  ground : — The  aim  is  perfection ; 
patience  the  road.  Our  lives  should  be  considered  as  a  ten 
dency,  an  approximation  only.  .  .  .  Mr.  R.  spoke  admirably 
on  the  nature  of  loyalty.  The  people  showed  a  good  deal 
of  the  sans-culotte  tendency  in  their  manners,  throwing  them 
selves  on  the  floor,  yawning,  and  going  out  when  they  had 
heard  enough.  Yet,  as  the  majority  differ  with  me,  to  begin 
with — that  being  the  reason  this  subject  was  chosen — they 
showed,  on  the  whole,  more  interest  and  deference  than  I 
had  expected.  As  I  am  accustomed  to  deference,  however, 
and  need  it  for  the  boldness  and  animation  which  my  part 
requires,  I  did  not  speak  with  as  much  force  as  usual.  .  .  . 
Sunday. — A  glorious  day ;  the  woods  full  of  perfume ;  I  was 
out  all  the  morning.  In  the  afternoon  Mrs.  R.  and  I  had  a 
talk.  I  said  my  position  would  be  too  uncertain  here,  as  I 

could  not  work.     said  '  they  would  all  like  to  work  for 

a  person  of  genius.'  .  .  .  '  Yes,'  I  told  her ;  '  but  where  would 
be  my  repose  when  they  were  always  to  be  judging  whether 
I  was  worth  it  or  not  ?  .  .  .  Each  day  you  must  prove  your 
self  anew.'  .  .  .  We  talked  of  the  principles  of  the  commu 
nity.  I  said  I  had  not  a  right  to  come,  because  all  the  con 
fidence  I  had  in  it  was  an  experiment  worth  trying,  and  that 
it  was  part  of  the  great  wave  of  inspired  thought.  .  .  .  We 
had  valuable  discussion  on  these  points.  All  Monday  morn 
ing  in  the  woods  again.  Afternoon,  out  with  the  drawing 
party ;  I  felt  the  evils  of  the  want  of  conventional  refinement, 
in  the  impudence  with  which  one  of  the  girls  treated  me. 
She  has  since  thought  of  it  with  regret,  I  notice ;  and  by 
every  day's  observation  of  me  will  see  that  she  ought  not 
to  have  done  it.  In  the  evening  a  husking  in  the  barn  .  .  . 
a  most  picturesque  scene.  ...  I  stayed  and  helped  about 
half  an  hour,  and  then  took  a  long  walk  beneath  the  stars. 

Wednesday In  the  evening  a  conversation  on  Impulse 

I  defended  nature,  as  I  always  do; — the  spirit  ascending 


88  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

through,  not  superseding,  nature.  But  in  the  scale  of  Sense, 
Intellect,  Spirit,  I  advocated  the  claims  of  Intellect,  because 
those  present  were  rather  disposed  to  postpone  them.  On 

the  nature  of  Beauty  we  had  good  talk.     seemed  in  a 

much  more  reverent  humour  than  the  other  night,  and  en 
joyed  the  large  plans  of  the  universe  which  were  unrolled 

Saturday.  —  Well,  good-bye,  Brook  Farm.  I  know  more 
about  this  place  than  I  did  when  I  came;  but  the  only  way 
to  be  qualified  for  a.  judge  of  such  an  experiment  would  be 
to  become  an  active,  though  unimpassioned,  associate  in  try 
ing  it.  ...  The  girl  who  was  so  rude  to  me  stood  waiting, 
with  a  timid  air,  to  bid  me  good-bye." 

The  young  girl  in  question  cannot  have  been  Haw 
thorne's  charming  Priscilla ;  nor  yet  another  young  lady, 
of  a  most  humble  spirit,  who  communicated  to  Margaret's 
biographers  her  recollections  of  this  remarkable  woman's 
visits  to  Brook  Farm ;  concluding  with  the  assurance  that 
"  after  a  while  she  seemed  to  lose  sight  of  my  more  prom 
inent  and  disagreeable  peculiarities,  and  treated  me  with 
affectionate  regard." 

Hawthorne's  farewell  to  the  place  appears  to  have  been 
accompanied  with  some  reflections  of  a  cast  similar  to 
those  indicated  by  Miss  Fuller;  in  so  far,  at  least,  as  we 
may  attribute  to  Hawthorne  himself  some  of  the  observa 
tions  that  he  fathers  upon  Miles  Coverdale.  His  biogra 
pher  justly  quotes  two  or  three  sentences  from  The  Blithe- 
dale  Romance,  as  striking  the  note  of  the  author's  feeling 
about  the  place.  "  No  sagacious  man,"  says  Coverdale, 
"  will  long  retain  his  sagacity  if  he  live  exclusively  among 
reformers  and  progressive  people,  without  periodically  re 
turning  to  the  settled  system  of  things,  to  correct  himself 
by  a  new  observation  from  that  old  standpoint."  And  he 
remarks  elsewhere,  that  "  it  struck  me  as  rather  odd  that 


IT.]         BROOK  FARM  AND  CONCORD.          89 

one  of  the  first  questions  raised,  after  our  separation  from 
the  greedy,  struggling,  self-seeking  world,  should  relate  to 
the  possibility  of  getting  the  advantage  over  the  outside 
barbarians  in  their  own  field  of  labour.  But  to  tell  the 
truth,  I  very  soon  became  sensible  that,  as  regarded  society 
at  large,  we  stood  in  a  position  of  new  hostility  rather  than 
new  brotherhood."  He  was  doubtless  oppressed  by  the 
"  sultry  heat  of  society,"  as  he  calls  it  in  one  of  the  jot 
tings  in  the  Note-Books.  "  What  would  a  man  do  if  he 
were  compelled  to  live  always  in  the  sultry  heat  of  socie 
ty,  and  could  never  bathe  himself  in  cool  solitude?"  His 
biographer  relates  that  one  of 'the  other  Brook  Farmers, 
wandering  afield  one  summer's  day,  discovered  Hawthorne 
stretched  at  his  length  upon  a  grassy  hill-side,  with  his  hat 
pulled  over  his  face,  and  every  appearance,  in  his  attitude, 
of  the  desire  to  escape  detection.  On  his  asking  him 
whether  he  had  any  particular  reason  for  this  shyness  of 
posture — "  Too  much  of  a  party  up  there !"  Hawthorne 
contented  himself  with  replying,  with  a  nod  in  the  direc 
tion  of  the  Hive.  He  had,  nevertheless,  for  a  time  looked 
forward  to  remaining  indefinitely  in  the  community;  he 
meant  to  marry  as  soon  as  possible,  and  bring  his  wife 
there  to  live.  Some  sixty  pages  of  the  second  volume  of 
the  American  Note-Books  are  occupied  with  extracts  from 
his  letters  to  his  future  wife  and  from  his  journal  (which 
appears,  however,  at  this  time  to  have  been  only  intermit 
tent),  consisting  almost  exclusively  of  descriptions  of  the 
simple  scenery  of  the  neighbourhood,  and  of  the  state  of 
the  woods,  and  fields,  and  weather.  Hawthorne's  fond 
ness  for  all  the  common  things  of  nature  was  deep  and 
constant,  and  there  is  always  something  charming  in  his 
verbal  touch,  as  we  may  call  it,  when  he  talks  to  himself 
about  them.  "  Oh,"  he  breaks  out,  of  an  October  after- 


90  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

noon,  "  the  beauty  of  grassy  slopes,  and  the  hollow  ways 
of  paths  winding  between  hills,  and  the  intervals  between 
the  road  and  wood-lots,  where  Summer  lingers  and  sits 
down,  strewing  dandelions  of  gold  and  blue' asters  as  her 
parting  gifts  and  memorials !"  He  was  but  a  single  sum 
mer  at  Brook  Farm  ;  the  rest  of  his  residence  had  the  win 
ter-quality. 

But  if  he  returned  to  solitude,  it  was  henceforth  to  be, 
as  the  French  say,  a  solitude  a  deux.  He  was  married  in 
July,  1842,  and  betook  himself  immediately  to  the  ancient 
village  of  Concord,  near  Boston,  where  he  occupied  the  so- 
called  Manse  which  has  given  the  title  to  one  of  his  collec 
tions  of  tales,  and  upon  which  this  work,  in  turn,  has  con 
ferred  a  permanent  distinction.  I  use  the  epithets  "  an 
cient"  and  "near"  in  the  foregoing  sentence,  according  to 
the  American  measurement  of  time  and  distance.  Con 
cord  is  some  twenty  miles  from  Boston ;  and  even  to-day, 
upwards  of  forty  years  after  the  date  of  Hawthorne's  re 
moval  thither,  it  is  a  very  fresh  and  well-preserved  look 
ing  town.  It  had  already  a  local  history  when,  a  hundred 
years  ago,  the  larger  current  of  human  affairs  flowed  for  a 
moment  around  it.  Concord  has  the  honour  of  being  the 
first  spot  in  which  blood  was  shed  in  the  war  of  the  Rev 
olution  ;  here  occurred  the  first  exchange  of  musket-shots 
between  the  King's  troops  and  the  American  insurgents. 
Here — as  Emerson  says  in  the  little  hymn  which  he  con 
tributed,  in  1836,  to  the  dedication  of  a  small  monument 
commemorating  this  circumstance — 

"  Here  once  the  embattled  farmers  stood, 

And  fired  the  shot  heard  round  the  world." 

The  battle  was  a  small  one,  and  the  farmers  were  not  des 
tined,  individually,  to  emerge  from  obscurity ;  but  the  mem- 


iv. J         BROOK  FARM  AXD  COXCORD.  *        91 

ory  of  these  things  has  kept  the  reputation  of  Concord 
green,  and  it  has  been  watered,  moreover,  so  to  speak,  by 
the  life-long  presence  there  of  one  of  the  most  honoured 
of  American  men  of  letters — the  poet  from  whom  I  just 
quoted  two  lines.  Concord  is,  indeed,  in  itself  decidedly 
verdant,  and  is  an  excellent  specimen  of  a  New  England 
village  of  the  riper  'sort.  At  the  time  of  Hawthorne's  first 
going  there,  it  must  have  been  an  even  better  specimen 
than  to-day — more  homogeneous,  more  indigenous,  more 
absolutely  democratic.  Forty  years  ago  the  tide  of  foreign 
immigration  had  scarcely  begun  to  break  upon  the  rural 
strongholds  of  the  New  England  race ;  it  had  at  most  be 
gun  to  splash  them  with  the  salt  Hibernian  spray.  It  is 
very  possible,  however,  that  at  this  period  there  was  not  an 
Irishman  in  Concord ;  the  place  would  have  been  a  village 
community  operating  in  excellent  conditions.  Such  a  vil 
lage  community  was  not  the  least  honourable  item  in  the 
sum  of  New  England  civilisation.  Its  spreading  elms  and 
plain  white  houses,  its  generous  summers  and  ponderous 
winters,  its  immediate  background  of  promiscuous  field  and 
forest,  would  have  been  part  of  the  composition.  For  the 
rest,  there  were  the  selectmen  and  the  town-meetings,  the 
town-schools  and  the  self-governing  spirit,  the  rigid  moral 
ity,  the  friendly  and  familiar  manners,  the  perfect  compe 
tence  of  the  little  society  to  manage  its  affairs  itself.  In- 
the  delightful  introduction  to  the  Mosses,  Hawthorne  has 
given  an  account  of  his  dwelling,  of  his  simple  occupations 
and  recreations,  and  of  some  of  the  characteristics  of  the 
place.  The  Manse  is  a  large,  square  wooden  house,  to  the 
surface  of  which — even  in  the  dry  New  England  air,  so 
unfriendly  to  mosses,  and  lichens,  and  weather-stains,  and 
the  other  elements  of  a  picturesque  complexion — a  hundred 
and  fifty  years  of  exposure  have  imparted  a  kind  of  tone, 


92  .  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

standing  just  above  the  slow -flowing  Concord  river,  and 
approached  by  a  short  avenue  of  over-arching  trees.  It 
had  been  the  dwelling-place  of  generations  of  Presbyterian 
ministers,  ancestors  of  the  celebrated  Emerson,  who  had 
himself  spent  his  early  manhood,  and  written  some  of  his 
most  beautiful  essays  there.  "He  used,"  as  Hawthorne 
says,  "  to  watch  the  Assyrian  dawn,  and  Paphian  sunset 
and  moonrise,  from  the  summit  of  our  eastern  hill."  From 
its  clerical  occupants  the  place  had  inherited  a  mild  mus- 
tiness  of  theological  association — a  vague  reverberation  of 
old  Calvinistic  sermons,  which  served  to  deepen  its  extra- 
mundane  and  somnolent  quality.  The  three  years  that 
Hawthorne  passed  here  were,  I  should  suppose,  among  the 
happiest  of  his  life.  The  future  was,  indeed,  not  in  any 
special  manner  assured;  but  the  present  was  sufficiently 
genial.  In  the  American  Note-Books  there  is  a  charming 
passage  (too  long  to  quote)  descriptive  of  the  entertain 
ment  the  new  couple  found  in  renovating  and  re-furnish 
ing  the  old  parsonage,  which,  at  the  time  of  their  going 
into  it,  was  given  up  to  ghosts  and  cobwebs.  Of  the  little 
drawing-room,  which  had  been  most  completely  reclaimed, 
he  writes  that  "  the  shade  of  our  departed  host  will  never 
haunt  it ;  for  its  aspect  has  been  as  completely  changed  as 
the  scenery  of  a  theatre.  Probably  the  ghost  gave  one 
peep  into  it,  uttered  a  groan,  and  vanished  forever."  This 
departed  host  was  a  certain  Doctor  Ripley,  a  venerable 
scholar,  who  left  behind  him  a  reputation  of  learning  and 
sanctity  which  was  reproduced  in  one  of  the  ladies  of  his 
family,  long  the  most  distinguished  woman  in  the  little 
Concord  circle.  Doctor  Kipley's  predecessor  had  been,  I 
believe,  the  last  of  the  line  of  the  Emerson  ministers — an 
old  gentleman  who,  in  the  earlier  years  of  his  pastorate, 
stood  at  the  window  of  his  study  (the  same  in  which  Haw- 


iv.]         BROOK  FARM  AND  CONCORD.          93 

thorne  handled  a  more  irresponsible  quill),  watching,  with 
his  hands  under  his  long  coat-tails,  the  progress  of  Concord 
fight.  It  is  not  by  any  means  related,  however,  I  should 
add,  that  he  waited  for  the  conclusion  to  make  up  his 
mind  which  was  the  righteous  cause. 

Hawthorne  had  a  little  society  (as  much,  we  may  infer, 
as  he  desired),  and  it  was  excellent  in  quality.  But  the 
pages  in  the  Note -Books  which  relate  to  his  life  at  the 
Manse,  and  the  introduction  to  the  Mosses,  make  more  of 
his  relations  with  vegetable  nature,  and  of  his  customary 
contemplation  of  the  incidents  of  wood-path  and  way-side, 
than  of  the  human  elements  of  the  scene ;  though  these 
also  are  gracefully  touched  upon.  These  pages  treat  large 
ly  of  the  pleasures  of  a  kitchen-garden,  of  the  beauty  of 
summer -squashes,  and  of  the  mysteries  of  apple  -  raising. 
"With  the  wholesome  aroma  of  apples  (as  is,  indeed,  almost 
necessarily  the  case  in  any  realistic  record  of  New  Eng 
land  rural  life)  they  are  especially  pervaded;  and  with 
many  other  homely  and  domestic  emanations;  all  of 
which  derive  a  sweetness  from  the  medium  of  our  author's 
colloquial  style.  Hawthorne  was  silent  with  his  lips ;  but 
he  talked  with  his  pen.  The  tone  of  his  writing  is  often 
that  of  charming  talk — ingenious,  fanciful,  slow-flowing, 
with  all  the  lightness  of  gossip,  and  none  of  its  vulgarity. 
In  the  preface  to  the  tales  written  at  the  Manse  he  talks 
of  many  things,  and  just  touches  upon  some  of  the  mem 
bers  of  his  circle — especially  upon  that  odd  genius,  his 
fellow-villager,  Henry  Thoreau.  I  said,  a  little  way  back, 
that  the  New  England  Transcendental  movement  had  suf 
fered,  in  the  estimation  of  the  world  at  large,  from  not  hav 
ing  (putting  Emerson  aside)  produced  any  superior  talents. 
But  any  reference  to  it  would  be  ungenerous  which  should 
omit  to  pay  a  tribute,  in  passing,  to  the  author  of  Walden. 


94  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

Whatever  question  there  may  be  of  his  talent,  there  can 
be  none,  I  think,  of  his  genius.  It  was  a  slim  and  crook 
ed  one,  but  it  was  eminently  personal.  He  was  imperfect, 
unfinished,  inartistic ;  he  was  worse  than  provincial  —  he 
was  parochial ;  it  is  only  at  his  best  that  he  is  readable. 
But  at  his  best  he  has  an  extreme  natural  charm,  and  he 
must  always  be  mentioned  after  those  Americans — Emer 
son,  Hawthorne,  Longfellow,  Lowell,  Motley  —  who  have 
written  originally.  He  was  Emerson's  independent  moral 
man  made  flesh — living  for  the  ages,  and  not  for  Saturday 
and  Sunday ;  for  the  Universe,  and  not  for  Concord.  In 
fact,  however,  Thoreau  lived  for  Concord  very  effectually ; 
and  by  his  remarkable  genius  for  the  observation  of  the 
phenomena  of  woods  and  streams,  of  plants  and  trees,  and 
beasts  and  fishes,  and  for  flinging  a  kind  of  spiritual  inter 
est  over  these  things,  he  did  more  than  he  perhaps  intend 
ed  towards  consolidating  the  fame  of  his  accidental  human 
sojourn.  He  was  as  shy  and  ungregarious  as  Hawthorne ; 
but  he  and  the  latter  appear  to  have  been  sociably  disposed 
towards  each  other,  and  there  are  some  charming  touches 
in  the  preface  to  the  Mosses  in  regard  to  the  hours  they 
spent  in  boating  together  on  the  large,  quiet  Concord  riv 
er.  Thoreau  was  a  great  voyager,  in  a  canoe  which  he 
had  constructed  himself,  and  which  he  eventually  made 
over  to  Hawthorne,  and  as  expert  in  the  use  of  the  paddle 
as  the  Eed  men  who  had  once  haunted  the  same  silent 
stream.  The  most  frequent  of  Hawthorne's  companions 
on  these  excursions  appears,  however,  to  have  been  a  local 
celebrity — as  well  as  Thoreau  a  high  Transcendentalist — 
Mr.  Ellery  Charming,  whom  I  may  mention,  since  he  is 
mentioned  very  explicitly  in  the  preface  to  the  Mosses, 
and  also  because  no  account  of  the  little  Concord  world 
would  be  complete  which  should  omit  him.  He  was  the 


iv.]         BROOK  FARM  AXD  CONCORD.          95 

son  of  the  distinguished  Unitarian  moralist,  and,  I  believe, 
the  intimate  friend  of  Thoreau,  whom  he  resembled  in 
having  produced  literary  compositions  more  esteemed  by 
the  few  than  by  the  many.  He  and  Hawthorne  were  both 
fishermen,  and  the  two  used  to  set  themselves  afloat  in 
the  summer  afternoons.  "  Strange  and  happy  times  were 
those,"  exclaims  the  more  distinguished  of  the  two  writ 
ers,  "  when  we  cast  aside  all  irksome  forms  and  strait-laced 
habitudes,  and  delivered  ourselves  up  to  the  free  air,  to  live 
like  the  Indians  or  any  less  conventional  race,  during  one 
bright  semicircle  of  the  sun.  Rowing  our  boat  against 
the  current,  between  wide  meadows,  we  turned  aside  into 
the  Assabeth.  A  more  lovely  stream  than  this,  for  a  mile 
above  its  junction  with  the  Concord,  has  never  flowed  on 
earth — nowhere,  indeed,  except  to  lave  the  interior  regions 
of  a  poet's  imagination.  ...  It  comes  flowing  softly 
through  the  midmost  privacy  and  deepest  heart  of  a  wood 
which  whispers  it  to  be  quiet ;  while  the  stream  whispers 
back  again  from  its  sedgy  borders,  as  if  river  and  wood 
were  hushing  one  another  to  sleep.  Yes ;  the  river  sleeps 
along  its  course  and  dreams  of  the  sky  and  the  clustering 
foliage. . . ."  While  Hawthorne  was  looking  at  these  beau 
tiful  things,  or,  for  that  matter,  was  writing  them,  he  was 
well  out  of  the  way  of  a  certain  class  of  visitants  whom  he 
alludes  to  in  one  of  the  closing  passages  of  this  long  In 
troduction.  "  Never  was  a  poor  little  country  village  in 
fested  with  such  a  variety  of  queer,  strangely-dressed,  odd 
ly-behaved  mortals,  most  of  whom  took  upon  themselves 
to  be  important  agents  of  the  world's  destiny,  yet  were 
simply  bores  of  a  very  intense  character."  "  These  hob 
goblins  of  flesh  and  blood,"  he  says,  in  a  preceding  par 
agraph,  "  were  attracted  thither  by  the  wide-spreading  in 
fluence  of  a  great  original  thinker  who  had  his  earth- 


96  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

ly  abode  at  the  opposite  extremity  of  our  village.  .  .  . 
People  that  had  lighted  on  a  new  thought,  or  a  thought 
they  fancied  new,  came  to  Emerson,  as  the  finder  of  a  glit 
tering  gem  hastens  to  a  lapidary,  to  ascertain  its  quali 
ty  and  value ;"  and  Hawthorne  enumerates  some  of  the 
categories  of  pilgrims  to  the  shrine  of  the  mystic  coun 
sellor,  who  as  a  general  thing  was  probably  far  from 
abounding  in  their  own  sense  (when  this  sense  was  per 
verted),  but  gave  them  a  due  measure  of  plain  practical 
advice.  The  whole  passage  is  interesting,  and  it  suggests 
that  little  Concord  had  not  been  ill-treated  by  the  fates — 
with  "  a  great  original  thinker  "  at  one  end  of  the  village, 
an  exquisite  teller  of  tales  at  the  other,  and  the  rows  of 
New  England  elms  between.  It  contains,  moreover,  an 
admirable  sentence  about  Hawthorne's  pilgrim  -  haunted 
neighbour,  with  whom,  "being  happy,"  as  he  says,  and 
feeling,  therefore,  "  as  if  there  were  no  question  to  be  put," 
he  was  not  in  metaphysical  communion.  "  It  was  good, 
nevertheless,  to  meet  him  in  the  wood-paths,  or  sometimes 
in  our  avenue,  with  that  pure  intellectual  gleam  diffused 
about  his  presence,  like  the  garment  of  a  shining  one ; 
and  he  so  quiet,  so  simple,  so  without  pretension,  encoun 
tering  each  man  alive  as  if  expecting  to  receive  more  than 
he  could  impart !"  One  may  without  indiscretion  risk  the 
surmise  that  Hawthorne's  perception  of  the  "shining"  el 
ement  in  his  distinguished  friend  was  more  intense  than 
his  friend's  appreciation  of  whatever  luminous  property 
might  reside  within  the  somewhat  dusky  envelope  of  our 
hero's  identity  as  a  collector  of  "  mosses."  Emerson,  as 
a  sort  of  spiritual  sun-worshipper,  could  have  attached  but 
a  moderate  value  to  Hawthorne's  cat-like  faculty  of  seeing 
in  the  dark. 

"  As  to  the  daily  course  of  our  life,"  the  latter  writes, 


iv.]         BROOK  FARM  AND  CONCORD.          97 

in  the  spring  of  1843,  "I  have  written  with  pretty  com 
mendable  diligence,  averaging  from  two  to  four  hours  a 
day ;  and  the  result  is  seen  in  various  magazines.  I  might 
have  written  more  if  it  had  seemed  worth  while,  but  I 
was  content  to  earn  only  so  much  gold  as  might  suffice 
for  our  immediate  wants,  having  prospect  of  official  station 
and  emolument  which  would  do  away  with  the  necessity 
of  writing  for  bread.  These  prospects  have  not  yet  had 
their  fulfilment ;  and  we  are  well  content  to  wait,  for  an 
office  would  inevitably  remove  us  from  our  present  happy 
home — at  least  from  an  outward  home ;  for  there  is  an 
inner  one  that  will  accompany  us  wherever  we  go.  Mean 
time,  the  magazine  people  do  not  pay  their  debts ;  so  that 
we  taste  some  of  the  inconveniences  of  poverty.  It  is  an 
annoyance,  not  a  trouble."  And  he  goes  on  to  give  some 
account  of  his  usual  habits.  (The  passage  is  from  his 
Journal,  and  the  account  is  given  to  himself,  as  it  were, 
with  that  odd,  unfamiliar  explicitness  which  marks  the 
tone  of  this  record  throughout.)  "Every  day  I  trudge 
through  snow  and  slush  to  the  village,  look  into  the  post- 
office,  and  spend  an  hour  at  the  reading-room ;  and  then 
return  home,  generally  without  having  spoken  a  word  to 
any  human  being.  ...  In  the  way  of  exercise  I  saw  and 
split  wood,  and  physically  I  was  never  in  a  better  condi 
tion  than  now."  He  adds  a  mention  of  an  absence  he 
had  lately  made.  "  I  went  alone  to  Salem,  where  I  re 
sumed  all  my  bachelor  habits  for  nearly  a  fortnight,  lead 
ing  the  same  life  in  which  ten  years  of  my  youth  flitted 
away  like  a  dream.  But  how  much  changed  was  I !  At 
last  I  had  got  hold  of  a  reality  which  never  could  be 
taken  from  me.  It  was  good  thus  to  get  apart  from  my 
happiness  for  the  sake  of  contemplating  it." 

These  compositions,  which  were  so  unpunctually  paid 
5* 


98  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

for,  appeared  in  the  Democratic  Review,  a  periodical  pub 
lished  at  Washington,  and  having,  as  our  author's  biog 
rapher  says,  "  considerable  pretensions  to  a  national  char 
acter."  It  is  to  be  regretted  that  the  practice  of  keeping 
its  creditors  waiting  should,  on  the  part  of  the  magazine 
in  question,  have  been  thought  compatible  with  these  pre 
tensions.  The  foregoing  lines  are  a  description  of  a  very 
monotonous  but  a  very  contented  life,  and  Mr..Lathrop 
justly  remarks  upon  the  dissonance  of  tone  of  the  tales 
Hawthorne  produced  under  these  happy  circumstances. 
It  is,  indeed,  not  a  little  of  an  anomaly.  The  episode  of 
the  Manse  was  one  of  the  most  agreeable  he  had  known, 
and  yet  the  best  of  the  Mosses  (though  not  the  greater 
number  of  them)  are  singularly  dismal  compositions. 
They  are  redolent  of  M.  Montegut's  pessimism.  "  The 
reality  of  sin,  the  pervasiveness  of  evil,"  says  Mr.  Lathrop, 
"  had  been  but  slightly  insisted  upon  in  the  earlier  tales : 
in  this  series  the  idea  bursts  up  like  a  long-buried  fire, 
with  earth-shaking  strength,  and  the  pits  of  hell  seem 
yawning  beneath  us."  This  is  very  true  (allowing  for  Mr. 
Lathrop's  rather  too  emphatic  way  of  putting  it) ;  but  the 
anomaly  is,  I  think,  on  the  whole,  only  superficial.  Our 
writer's  imagination,  as  has  been  abundantly  conceded, 
was  a  gloomy  one ;  the  old  Puritan  sense  of  sin,  of  penal 
ties  to  be  paid,  of  the  darkness  and  wickedness  of  life, 
had,  as  I  have  already  suggested,  passed  into  it.  It  had 
not  passed  into  the  parts  of  Hawthorne's  nature  corre 
sponding  to  those  occupied  by  the  same  horrible  vision  of 
things  in  his  ancestors;  but  it  had  still  been  determined 
to  claim  this  later  comer  as  its  own,  and  since  his  heart 
and  his  happiness  were  to  escape,  it  insisted  on  setting  its 
mark  upon  his  genius — upon  his  most  beautiful  organ,  his 
admirable  fancy.  It  may  be  said  that  when  his  fancy  was 


IT.]         BROOK  FARM  AND  CONCORD.          99 

strongest  and  keenest,  when  it  was  most  itself,  then  the 
dark  Puritan  tinge  showed  in  it  most  richly ;  and  there 
cannot  be  a  better  proof  that  he  was  not  the  man  of  a 
sombre  parti-pris  whom  M.  Montegut  describes,  than  the 
fact  that  these  duskiest  flowers  of  his  invention  sprang 
straight  from  the  soil  of  his  happiest  days.  This  surely 
indicates  that  there  was  but  little  direct  connection  be 
tween  the  products  of  his  fancy  and  the  state  of  his  af 
fections.  When  he  was  lightest  at  heart,  he  was  most  cre 
ative  ;  and  when  he  was  most  creative,  the  moral  pictu- 
resqueness  of  the  old  secret  of  mankind  in  general  and  of 
the  Puritans  in  particular,  most  appealed  to  him — the  se 
cret  that  we  are  really  not  by  any  means  so  good  as  a 
well-regulated  society  requires  us  to  appear.  It  is  not 
too  much  to  say,  even,  that  the  very  condition  of  produc 
tion  of  some  of  these  unamiable  tales  would  be  that  they 
should  be  superficial,  and,  as  it  were,  insincere.  The  mag 
nificent  little  romance  of  Young  Goodman  Brown,  for  in 
stance,  evidently  means  nothing  as  regards  Hawthorne's 
own  state  of  mind,  his  conviction  of  human  depravity  and 
his  consequent  melancholy ;  for  the  simple  reason  that,  if 
it  meant  anything,  it  would  mean  too  much.  Mr.  Lathrop 
speaks  of  it  as  a  "  terrible  and  lurid  parable ;"  but  this,  it 
seems  to  me,  is  just  what  it  is  not.  It  is  not  a  parable, 
but  a  picture,  which  is  a  very  different  thing.  What  does 
M.  Montegut  make,  one  would  ask,  from  the  point  of  view 
of  Hawthorne's  pessimism,  of  the  singularly  objective  and 
unpreoccupied  tone  of  the  Introduction  to  the  Old  Manse, 
in  which  the  author  speaks  from  himself,  and  in  which 
the  cry  of  metaphysical  despair  is  not  even  faintly 
sounded  ? 

We  have  seen  that  when  he  went  into  the  village  he  of 
ten  came  home  without  having  spoken  a  word  to  a  human 


100  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

being.  There  is  a  touching  entry  made  a  little  later,  bear 
ing  upon  his  mild  taciturnity.  "A  cloudy  veil  stretches 
across  the  abyss  of  my  nature.  I  have,  however,  no  love 
of  secrecy  and  darkness.  I  am  glad  to  think  that  God 
sees  through  my  heart,  and  if  any  angel  has  power  to  pen 
etrate  into  it,  he  is  welcome  to  know  everything  that  is 
there.  Yes,  and  so  may  any  mortal  who  is  capable  of  full 
sympathy,  and  therefore  worthy  to  come  into  my  depths. 
But  he  must  find  his  own  way  there ;  I  can  neither  guide 
nor  enlighten  him."  It  must  be  acknowledged,  however, 
that  if  he  was  not  able  to  open  the  gate  of  conversation,  it 
was  sometimes  because  he  was  disposed  to  slide  the  bolt 
himself.  "  I  had  a  purpose,"  he  writes,  shortly  before  the 
entry  last  quoted,  "if  circumstances  would  permit,  of  pass 
ing  the  whole  term  of  my  wife's  absence  without  speaking 
a  word  to  any  human  being."  He  beguiled  these  incom 
municative  periods  by  studying  German,  in  Tieck  and 
Burger,  without  apparently  making  much  progress ;  also 
in  reading  French,  in  Voltaire  and  Rabelais.  "  Just  now," 
he  writes,  one  October  noon,  "  I  heard  a  sharp  tapping  at 
the  window  of  my  study,  and,  looking  up  from  my  book 
(a  volume  of  Rabelais),  behold,  the  head  of  a  little  bird, 
who  seemed  to  demand  admittance."  It  was  a  quiet  life, 
of  course,  in  which  these  diminutive  incidents  seemed  note 
worthy  ;  and  what  is  noteworthy  here  to  the  observer  of 
Hawthorne's  contemplative  simplicity,  is  the  fact  that, 
though  he  finds  a  good  deal  to  say  about  the  little  bird 
(he  devotes  several  lines  more  to  it),  he  makes  no  remark 
upon  Rabelais.  He  had  other  visitors  than  little  birds, 
however,  and  their  demands  were  also  not  Rabelaisian. 
Thoreau  comes  to  see  him,  and  they  talk  "  upon  the  spir 
itual  advantages  of  change  of  place,  and  upon  the  Dial, 
and  upon  Mr.  Alcott,  and  other  kindred  or  concatenated 


IT.]         BROOK  FARM  AND  CONCORD.         101 

subjects."  Mr.  Alcott  was  an  arch-transcendentalist,  living 
in  Concord,  and  the  Dial  was  a  periodical  to  which  the 
illuminated  spirits  of  Boston  and  its  neighbourhood  used 
to  contribute.  Another  visitor  comes  and  talks  "  of  Mar 
garet  Fuller,  who,  he  says,  has  risen  perceptibly  into  a  high 
er  state  since  their  last  meeting."  There  is  probably  a 
great  deal  of  Concord  five-and-thirty  years  ago  in  that  lit 
tle  sentence ! 


CHAPTER  V. 

THE  THREE  AMERICAN  NOVELS. 

THE  prospect  of  official  station  and  emolument  which 
Hawthorne  mentions  in  one  of  those  paragraphs  from 
his  Journals  which  I  have  just  quoted,  as  having  offered 
itself  and  then  passed  away,  was  at  last,  in  the  event,  con 
firmed  by  his  receiving  from  the  administration  of  Presi 
dent  Polk  the  gift  of  a  place  in  the  Custom-house  of  his 
native  town.  The  office  was  a  modest  one,  and  "  official 
station  "  may  perhaps  appear  a  magniloquent  formula  for 
the  functions  sketched  in  the  admirable  Introduction  to 
The  Scarlet  Letter.  Hawthorne's  duties  were  those  of 
Surveyor  of  the  port  of  Salem,  and  they  had  a  salary  at 
tached,  which  was  the  important  part ;  as  his  biographer 
tells  us  that  he  had  received  almost  nothing  for  the  con 
tributions  to  the  Democratic  Review.  He  bade  farewell 
to  his  ex-parsonage,  and  went  back  to  Salem  in  1846,  and 
the  immediate  effect  of  his  ameliorated  fortune  was  to 
make  him  stop  writing.  None  of  his  Journals  of  the 
period,  from  his  going  to  Salem  to  1850,  have  been  pub 
lished  ;  from  which  I  infer  that  he  even  ceased  to  journal 
ise.  The  Scarlet  Letter  was  not  written  till  1849.  In 
the  delightful  prologue  to  that  work,  entitled  The  Custom- 
house,  he  embodies  some  of  the  impressions  gathered  dur- 


CHAP,  v.]  THE  THREE  AMERICAN  NOVELS.  103 

ing  these  years  of  comparative  leisure  (I  say  of  leisure,  be 
cause  he  does  not  intimate  in  this  sketch  of  his  occupa 
tions  that  his  duties  were  onerous).  He  intimates,  how 
ever,  that  they  were  not  interesting,  and  that  it  was  a  very 
good  thing  for  him,  mentally  and  morally,  when  his  term 
of  service  expired — or  rather  when  he  was  removed  from 
office  by  the  operation  of  that  wonderful  "  rotatory  "  sys 
tem  which  his  countrymen  had  invented  for  the  adminis 
tration  of  their  affairs.  This  sketch  of  the  Custom-house 
is,  as  simple  writing,  one  of  the  most  perfect  of  Haw 
thorne's  compositions,  and  one  of  the  most  gracefully  and 
humorously  autobiographic.  It  would  be  interesting  to 
examine  it  in  detail,  but  I  prefer  to  use  my  space  for  mak 
ing  some  remarks  upon  the  work  which  was  the  ultimate 
result  of  this  period  of  Hawthorne's  residence  in  his  native 
town  ;  and  I  shall,  for  convenience'  sake,  say  directly  after 
wards  what  I  have  to  say  about  the  two  companions  of 
The  Scarlet  Letter — The  House  of  the  Seven  Gables  and 
The  Blithedale  Romance.  I  quoted  some  passages  from 
the  prologue  to  the  first  of  these  novels  in  the  early  pages 
of  this  essay.  There  is  another  passage,  however,  which 
bears  particularly  upon  this  phase  of  Hawthorne's  career, 
and  which  is  so  happily  expressed  as  to  make  it  a  pleas 
ure  to  transcribe  it  —  the  passage  in  which  he  says  that 
"  for  myself,  during  the  whole  of  my  Custom-house  expe 
rience,  moonlight  and  sunshine,  and  the  glow  of  the  fire 
light,  were  just  alike  in  my  regard,  and  neither  of  them 
was  of  one  whit  more  avail  than  the  twinkle  of  a  tallow- 
candle.  An  entire  class  of  susceptibilities,  and  a  gift  con 
nected  with  them — of  no  great  richness  or  value,  but  the 
best  I  had — was  gone  from  me."  He  goes  on  to  say  that 
he  believes  that  he  might  have  done  something  if  he  could 
have  made  up  his  mind  to  convert  the  very  substance  of 


104  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

the  commonplace  that  surrounded  him  into  matter  of  lit 
erature. 

"  I  might,  for  instance,  have  contented  myself  with  writing 
out  the  narratives  of  a  veteran  shipmaster,  one  of  the  inspect 
ors,  whom  I  should  be  most  ungrateful  not  to  mention ; 
since  scarcely  a  day  passed  that  he  did  not  stir  me  to  laughter 
and  admiration  by  his  marvellous  gift  as  a  story-teller.  .  .  . 
Or  I  might  readily  have  found  a  more  serious  task.  It  was 
a  folly,  with  the  materiality  of  this  daily  life  pressing  so  in 
trusively  upon  me,  to  attempt  to  fling  myself  back  into  an 
other  age ;  or  to  insist  on  creating  a  semblance  of  a  world 
out  of  airy  matter.  .  .  .  The  wiser  effort  would  have  been, 
to  diffuse  thought  and  imagination  through  the  opaque  sub 
stance  of  to-day,  and  thus  make  it  a  bright  transparency .  .  . 
to  seek  resolutely  the  true  and  indestructible  value  that  lay 
hidden  in  the  petty  and  wearisome  incidents  and  ordinary 
characters  with  which  I  was  now  conversant.  The  fault 
was  mine.  The  page  of  life  that  was  spread  out  before  me 
was  dull  and  commonplace,  only  because  I  had  not  fath 
omed  its  deeper  import.  A  better  book  than  I  shall  ever 
write  was  there.  .  .  .  These  perceptions  came  too  late. .  .  . 
I  had  ceased  to  be  a  writer  of  tolerably  poor  tales  and  es 
says,  and  had  become  a  tolerably  good  Surveyor  of  the  Cus 
toms.  That  was  all.  But,  nevertheless,  it  is  anything  but 
agreeable  to  be  haunted  by  a  suspicion  that  one's  intellect 
is  dwindling  away,  or  exhaling,  without  your  consciousness, 
like  ether  out  of  phial ;  so  that  at  every  glance  you  find  a 
smaller  and  less  volatile  residuum." 

As,  however,  it  was  with  what  was  left  of  his  intellect  af 
ter  three  years'  evaporation,  that  Hawthorne  wrote  The 
Scarlet  Letter,  there  is  little  reason  to  complain  of  the 
injury  he  suffered  in  his  Surveyorship. 

His  publisher,  Mr.  Fields,  in  a  volume  .entitled  Tester- 
days  with  Authors,  has  related  the  circumstances  in  which 


v.]  THE  THREE  AMERICAN  NOVELS.  105 

Hawthorne's  masterpiece  came  into  the  world.  "  In  the 
winter  of  1849,  after  he  had  been  ejected  from  the  Cus 
tom-house,  I  went  down  to  Salem  to  see  him  and  inquire 
after  his  health,  for  we  heard  he  had  been  suffering  from 
illness.  He  was  then  living  in  a  modest  wooden  house.  .  .  . 
I  found  him  alone  in  a  chamber  over  the  sitting-room  of 
the  dwelling,  and  as  the  day  was  cold  he  was  hovering  near 
a  stove.  AVe  fell  into  talk  about  his  future  prospects,  and 
he  was,  as  I  feared  I  should  find  him,  in  a  very  despond 
ing  mood."  His  visitor  urged  him  to  bethink  himself  of 
publishing  something,  and  Hawthorne  replied  by  calling 
his  attention  to  the  small  popularity  his  published  pro 
ductions  had  yet  acquired,  and  declaring  he  had  done 
nothing,  and  had  no  spirit  for  doing  anything.  The  nar 
rator  of  the  incident  urged  upon  him  the  necessity  of  a 
more  hopeful  view  of  his  situation,  and  proceeded  to  take 
leave.  He  had  not  reached  the  street,  however,  when 
Hawthorne  hurried  to  overtake  him,  and,  placing  a  roll 
of  MS.  in  his  hand,  bade  him  take  it  to  Boston,  read  it, 
and  pronounce  upon  it.  "  It  is  either  very  good  or  very 
bad,"  said  the  author ;  "  I  don't  know  which."  "  On  my 
way  back  to  Boston,"  says  Mr.  Fields,  "  I  read  the  germ  of 
The  Scarlet  Letter;  before  I  slept  that  night  I  wrote  him 
a  note  all  aglow  with  admiration  of  the  marvellous  story 
he  had  put  into  my  hands,  and  told  him  that  I  would 
come  again  to  Salem  the  next  day  and  arrange  for  its  pub 
lication.  I  went  on  in  such  an  amazing  state  of  excite 
ment,  when  we  met  again  in  the  little  house,  that  he 
would  not  believe  I  was  really  in  earnest.  He  seemed 
to  think  I  was  beside  myself,  and  laughed  sadly  at  my 
enthusiasm."  Hawthorne,  however,  went  on  with  the 
book  and  finished  it,  but  it  appeared  only  a  year  later. 
His  biographer  quotes  a  passage  from  a  letter  which  he 


106  HAWTHORXE.  [CHAP. 

wrote  in  February,  1850,  to  his  friend  Horatio  Bridge. 
"  I  finished  my  book  only  yesterday ;  one  end  being  in 
the  press  at  Boston,  while  the  other  was  in  my  head  here 
at  Salem ;  so  that,  as  you  see,  my  story  is  at  least  fourteen 
miles  long.  ...  My  book,  the  publisher  tells  me,  will  not 
be  out  before  April.  He  speaks  of  it  in  tremendous  terms 
of  approbation  ;  so  does  Mrs.  Hawthorne,  to  whom  I  read 
the  conclusion  last  night.  It  broke  her  heart,  and  sent  her 
to  bed  with  a  grievous  headache — which  I  look  upon  as  a 
triumphant  success.  Judging  from  the  effect  upon  her  and 
the  publisher,  I  may  calculate  on  what  bowlers  call  a  ten- 
strike.  But  I  don't  make  any  such  calculation."  And 
Mr.  Lathrop  calls  attention,  in  regard  to  this  passage,  to 
an  allusion  in  the  English  Note -Books  (September  14, 
1855).  "Speaking  of  Thackeray,  I  cannot  but  wonder  at 
his  coolness  in  respect  to  his  own  pathos,  and  compare 
it  to  my  own  emotions  when  I  read  the  last  scene  of  The 
Scarlet  Letter  to  my  wife,  just  after  writing  it — tried  to 
read  it,  rather,  for  my  voice  swelled  and  heaved  as  if  I 
were  tossed  up  and  down  on  an  ocean  as  it  subsides  after 
a  storm.  But  I  was  in  a  very  nervous  state  then,  having 
gone  through  a  great  diversity  of  emotion  while  writing  it, 
for  many  months." 

The  work  has  the  tone  of  the  circumstances  in  which 
it  was  produced.  If  Hawthorne  was  in  a  sombre  mood, 
and  if  his  future  was  painfully  vague,  The  Scarlet  Letter 
contains  little  enough  of  gaiety  or  of  hopefulness.  It  is 
densely  dark,  with  a  single  spot  of  vivid  colour  in  it ;  and 
it  will  probably  long  remain  the  most  consistently  gloomy 
of  English  novels  of  the  first  order.  But  I  just  now  called 
it  the  author's  masterpiece,  and  I  imagine  it  will  continue 
to  be,  for  other  generations  than  ours,  his  most  substantial 
title  to  fame.  The  subject  had  probably  lain  a  long  time 


v.]  THE  THREE  AMERICAN  NOVELS.  107 

in  his  mind,  as  his  subjects  were  apt  to  do ;  so  that  he  ap 
pears  completely  to  possess  it,  to  know  it  and  feel  it.  It 
is  simpler  and  more  complete  than  his  other  novels;  it 
achieves  more  perfectly  what  it  attempts,  and  it  has  about 
it  that  charm,  very  hard  to  express,  which  we  find  in  an 
artist's  work  the  first  time  he  has  touched  his  highest 
mark — a  sort  of  straightness  and  naturalness  of  execution, 
an  unconsciousness  of  his  public,  and  freshness  of  interest 
in  his  theme.  It  was  a  great  success,  and  he  immediate 
ly  found  himself  famous.  The  writer  of  these  lines,  who 
was  a  child  at  the  time,  remembers  dimly  the  sensation 
the  book  produced,  and  the  little  shudder  with  which 
people  alluded  to  it,  as  if  a  peculiar  horror  were  mixed 
with  its  attractions.  He  was  too  young  to  read  it  him 
self ;  but  its  title,  upon  which  he  fixed  his  eyes  as  the 
book  lay  upon  the  table,  had  a  mysterious  charm.  He 
had  a  vague  belief,  indeed,  that  the  "  letter "  in  question 
was  one  of  the  documents  that  come  by  the  post,  and  it 
was  a  source  of  perpetual  wonderment  to  him  that  it 
should  be  of  such  an  unaccustomed  hue.  Of  course  it 
was  difficult  to  explain  to  a  child  the  significance  of  poor 
Hester  Prynne's  blood- coloured  A.  But  the  mystery  was 
at  last  partly  dispelled  by  his  being  taken  to  see  a  collec 
tion  of  pictures  (the  annual  exhibition  of  the  National 
Academy),  where  he  encountered  a  representation  of  a 
pale,  handsome  woman,  in  a  quaint  black  dress  and  a 
white  coif,  holding  between  her  knees  an  elfish -looking 
little  girl,  fantastically  dressed,  and  crowned  with  flowers. 
Embroidered  on  the  woman's  breast  was  a  great  crimson 
A,  over  which  the  child's  fingers,  as  she  glanced  strangely 
out  of  the  picture,  were  maliciously  playing.  I  was  told 
that  this  wras  Hester  Prynne  and  little  Pearl,  and  that  when 
I  grew  older  I  might  read  their  interesting  history.  But 


108  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

the  picture  remained  vividly  imprinted  on  my  mind;  I 
Lad  been  vaguely  frightened  and  made  uneasy  by  it ;  and 
when,  years  afterwards,  I  first  read  the  novel,  I  seemed  to 
myself  to  have  read  it  before,  and  to  be  familiar  with  its 
two  strange  heroines.  I  mention  this  incident  simply  as 
an  indication  of  the  degree  to  which  the  success  of  The 
Scarlet  Letter  had  made  the  book  what  is  called  an  actu 
ality.  Hawthorne  himself  was  very  modest  about  it;  he 
wrote  to  his  publisher,  when  there  was  a  question  of  his 
undertaking  another  novel,  that  what  had  given  the  his 
tory  of  Hester  Prynne  its  "  vogue  "  was  simply  the  intro 
ductory  chapter.  In  fact,  the  publication  of  The  Scarlet 
Letter  was  in  the  United  States  a  literary  event  of  the  first 
importance.  The  book  was  the  finest  piece  of  imaginative 
writing  yet  put  forth  in  the  country.  There  was  a  con 
sciousness  of  this  in  the  welcome  that  was  given  it — a  sat 
isfaction  in  the  idea  of  America  having  produced  a  novel 
that  belonged  to  literature,  and  to  the  forefront  of  it. 
Something  might  at  last  be  sent  to  Europe  as  exquisite  in 
quality  as  anything  that  had  been  received,  and  the  best 
of  it  was  that  the  thing  was  absolutely  American ;  it  be 
longed  to  the  soil,  to  the  air ;  it  came  out  of  the  very 
heart  of  New  England. 

It  is  beautiful,  admirable,  extraordinary  ;  it  has  in  the 
highest  degree  that  merit  which  I  have  spoken  of  as  the 
mark  of  Hawthorne's  best  things — an  indefinable  purity 
and  lightness  of  conception,  a  quality  which  in  a  work  of 
art  affects  one  in  the  same  way  as  the  absence  of  grossness 
does  in  a  human  being.  His  fancy,  as  I  just  now  said, 
had  evidently  brooded  over  the  subject  for  a  long  time  ; 
the  situation  to  be  represented  had  disclosed  itself  to  him 
in  all  its  phases.  When  I  say  in  all  its  phases,  the  sen 
tence  demands  modification ;  for  it  is  to  be  remembered 


v.]        THE  THREE  AMERICAN  NOVELS.        109 

that  if  Hawthorne  laid  his  hand  upon  the  well-worn  theme, 
upon  the  familiar  combination  of  the  wife,  the  lover,  and 
the  husband,  it  was,  after  all,  but  to  one  period  of  the  his 
tory  of  these  three  persons  that  he  attached  himself.  The 
situation  is  the  situation  after  the  woman's  fault  has  been 
committed,  and  the  current  of  expiation  and  repentance 
has  set  in.  In  spite  of  the  relation  between  Hester  Prynne 
and  Arthur  Dimmesdale,  no  story  of  love  was  surely  ever 
less  of  a  "  love-story."  To  Hawthorne's  imagination  the 
fact  that  these  two  persons  had  loved  each  other  too  well 
was  of  an  interest  comparatively  vulgar ;  what  appealed  to 
him  was  the  idea  of  their  moral  situation  in  the  long  years 
that  were  to  follow.  The  story,  indeed,  is  in  a  secondary 
degree  that  of  Hester  Prynne  ;  she  becomes,  really,  after 
the  first  scene,  an  accessory  figure  ;  it  is  not  upon  her  the 
denoument  depends.  It  is  upon  her  guilty  lover  that  the 
author  projects  most  frequently  the  cold,  thin  rays  of  his 
fitfully-moving  lantern,  which  makes  here  and  there  a  lit 
tle  luminous  circle,  on  the  edge  of  which  hovers  the  livid 
and  sinister  figure  of  the  injured  and  retributive  husband. 
The  story  goes  on,  for  the  most  part,  between  the  lover  and 
the  husband — the  tormented  young  Puritan  minister,  who 
carries  the  secret  of  his  own  lapse  from  pastoral  purity 
locked  up  beneath  an  exterior  that  commends  itself  to 
the  reverence  of  his  flock,  while  he  sees  the  softer  partner 
of  his  guilt  standing  in  the  full  glare  of  exposure  and 
humbling  herself  to  the  misery  of  atonement — between 
this  more  wretched  and  pitiable  culprit,  to  whom  dishon 
our  would  come  as  a  comfort  and  the  pillory  as  a  relief, 
and  the  older,  keener,  wiser  man,  who,  to  obtain  satisfac 
tion  for  the  wrong  he  has  suffered,  devises  the  infernally 
ingenious  plan  of  conjoining  himself  with  his  wronger, 
living  with  him,  living  upon  him  ;  and  while  he  pretends  to 


110  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

minister  to  his  hidden  ailment  and  to  sympathise  with  his 
pain,  revels  in  his  unsuspected  knowledge  of  these  things, 
and  stimulates  them  by  malignant  arts.  The  attitude  of 
Roger  Chillingvvorth,  and  the  means  he  takes  to  compen 
sate  himself — these  are  the  highly  original  elements  in  the 
situation  that  Hawthorne  so  ingeniously  treats.  None  of 
his  works  are  so  impregnated  with  that  after-sense  of  the 
old  Puritan  consciousness  of  life  to  which  allusion  has  so 
often  been  made.  If,  as  M.  Montegut  says,  the  qualities 
of  his  ancestors  filtered  down  through  generations  into  his 
composition,  The  Scarlet  Letter  was,  as  it  were,  the  vessel 
that  gathered  up  the  last  of  the  precious  drops.  And  I 
say  this  not  because  the  story  happens  to  be  of  so-called 
historical  cast,  to  be  told  of  the  early  days  of  Massachu 
setts,  and  of  people  in  steeple-crowned  hats  and  sad-colour 
ed  garments.  The  historical  colouring  is  rather  weak' than 
otherwise ;  there  is  little  elaboration  of  detail,  of  the  mod 
ern  realism  of  research ;  and  the  author  has  made  no  great 
point  of  causing  his  figures  to  speak  the  English  of  their 
period.  Nevertheless,  the  book  is  full  of  the  moral  pres 
ence  of  the  race  that  invented  Hester's  penance — diluted 
and  complicated  with  other  things,  but  still  perfectly  rec 
ognisable.  Puritanism,  in  a  word,  is  there,  not  only  objec 
tively,  as  Hawthorne  tried  to  place  it  there,  but  subjective 
ly  as  well.  Not,  I  mean,  in  his  judgment  of  his  charac 
ters  in  any  harshness  of  prejudice,  or  in  the  obtrusion  of  a 
moral  lesson ;  but  in  the  very  quality  of  his  own  vision,  in 
the  tone  of  the  picture,  in  a  certain  coldness  and  exclusive- 
ness  of  treatment. 

The  faults  of  the  book  are,  to  my  sense,  a  want  of  re 
ality  and  an  abuse  of  the  fanciful  element — of  a  certain 
superficial  symbolism.  The  people  strike  me  not  as  char 
acters,  but  as  representatives,  very  picturesquely  arranged, 


v.]  THE  THREE  AMERICAN  NOVELS.  Ill 

of  a  single  state  of  mind;  and  the  interest  of  the  story 
lies,  not  in  them,  but  in  the  situation,  which  is  insistently 
kept  before  us,  with  little  progression,  though  with  a  great 
deal,  as  I  have  said,  of  a  certain  stable  variation ;  and  to 
which  they,  out  of  their  reality,  contribute  little  that  helps 
it  to  live  and  move.  I  was  made  to  feel  this  want  of  real 
ity,  this  over-ingenuity,  of  The  Scarlet  Letter,  by  chancing 
not  long  since  upon  a  novel  which  was  read  fifty  years 
ago  much  more  than  to-day,  but  which  is  still  worth  read 
ing — the  story  of  Adam  Blair,  by  John  Gibson  Lockhart. 
This  interesting  and  powerful  little  tale  has  a  great  deal  of 
analogy  with  Hawthorne's  novel — quite  enough,  at  least, 
to  suggest  a  comparison  between  them ;  and  the  compari 
son  is  a  very  interesting  one  to  make,  for  it  speedily  leads 
us  to  larger  considerations  than  simple  resemblances  and 
divergences  of  plot. 

Adam  Blair,  like  Arthur  Dimmesdale,  is  a  Calvinistic 
minister  who  becomes  the  lover  of  a  married  woman,  is 
overwhelmed  with  remorse  at  his  misdeed,  and  makes  a 
public  confession  of  it;  then  expiates  it  by  resigning  his 
pastoral  office  and  becoming  a  humble  tiller  of  the  soil,  as 
his  father  had  been.  The  two  stories  are  of  about  the 
same  length,  and  each  is  the  masterpiece  (putting  aside, 
of  course,  as  far  as  Lockhart  is  concerned,  the  Life  of 
Scott)  of  the  author.  They  deal  alike  with  the  manners 
of  a  rigidly  theological  society,  and  even  in  certain  details 
they  correspond.  In  each  of  them,  between  the  guilty 
pair,  there  is  a  charming  little  girl ;  though  I  hasten  to 
say  that  Sarah  Blair  (who  is  not  the  daughter  of  the  hero 
ine,  but  the  legitimate  offspring  of  the  hero,  a  widower) 
is  far  from  being  as  brilliant  and  graceful  an  apparition 
as  the  admirable  little  Pearl  of  The  Scarlet  Letter.  The 
main  difference  between  the  two  tales  is  the  fact  that  in 


112  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

the  American  story  the  husband  plays  an  all-important 
part,  and  in  the  Scottish  plays  almost  none  at  all.  Adam 
Blair  is  the  history  of  the  passion,  and  The  Scarlet  Letter 
the  history  of  its  sequel ;  but  nevertheless,  if  one  has  read 
the  two  books  at  a  short  interval,  it  is  impossible  to  avoid 
confronting  them.  I  confess  that  a  large  portion  of  the 
interest  of  Adam  Blair,  to  my  mind,  when  once  I  had 
perceived  that  it  would  repeat  in  a  great  measure  the  sit 
uation  of  The  Scarlet  Letter,  lay  in  noting  its  difference  of 
tone.  It  threw  into  relief  the  passionless  quality  of  Haw 
thorne's  novel,  its  element  of  cold  and  ingenious  fantasy, 
its  elaborate  imaginative  delicacy.  These  things  do  not 
precisely  constitute  a  weakness  in  The  Scarlet  Letter ;  in 
deed,  in  a  certain  way  they  constitute  a  great  strength ; 
but  the  absence  of  a  certain  something  warm  and  straight 
forward,  a  trifle  more  grossly  human  and  vulgarly  natural, 
which  one  finds  in  Adam  Blair,  will  always  make  Haw 
thorne's  tale  less  touching  to  a  large  number  of  even  very 
intelligent  readers,  than  a  love-story  told  with  the  robust, 
synthetic  pathos  which  served  Lockhart  so  well.  His 
novel  is  not  of  the  first  rank  (I  should  call  it  an  excellent 
second-rate  one),  but  it  borrows  a  charm  from  the  fact 
that  his  vigorous,  but  not  strongly  imaginative,  mind  was 
impregnated  with  the  reality  of  his  subject.  He  did  not 
always  succeed  in  rendering  this  reality;  the  expression 
is  sometimes  awkward  and  poor.  But  the  reader  feels 
that  his  vision  was  clear,  and  his  feeling  about  the  matter 
very  strong  and  rich.  Hawthorne's  imagination,  on  the 
other  hand,  plays  with  his  .theme  so  incessantly,  leads  it 
such  a  dance  through  the  moon-lighted  air  of  his  intellect, 
that  the  thing  cools  off,  as  it  were,  hardens  and  stiffens, 
and,  producing  effects  much  more  exquisite,  leaves  the 
reader  with  a  sense  of  having  handled  a  splendid  piece  of 


v.]  THE  THREE  AMERICAN  NOVELS.  113 

silversmith's  work.  Lockhart,  by  means  much  more  vul 
gar,  produces  at  moments  a  greater  illusion,  and  satisfies 
our  inevitable  desire  for  something,  in  the  people  in  whom 
it  is  sought  to  interest  us,  that  shall  be  of  the  same  pitch 
and  the  same  continuity  with  ourselves.  Above  all,  it  is 
interesting  to  see  how  the  same  subject  appears  to  two 
men  of  a  thoroughly  different  cast  of  mind  and  of  a  differ 
ent  race.  Lockhart  was  struck  with  the  warmth  of  the 
subject  that  offered  itself  to  him,  and  Hawthorne  with  its 
coldness ;  the  one  with  its  glow,  its  sentimental  interest — 
the  other  with  its  shadow,  its  moral  interest.  Lockhart's 
story  is  as  decent,  as  severely  draped,  as  The  Scarlet  Let 
ter ;  but  the  author  has  a  more  vivid  sense  than  appears 
to  have  imposed  itself  upon  Hawthorne,  of  some  of  the  in 
cidents  of  the  situation  he  describes ;  his  tempted  man  and 
tempting  woman  are  more  actual  and  personal;  his  heroine 
in  especial,  though  not  in  the  least  a  delicate  or  a  subtle 
conception,  has  a  sort  of  credible,  visible,  palpable  proper 
ty,  a  vulgar  roundness  and  relief,  which  are  lacking  to  the 
dim  and  chastened  image  of  Hester  Prynne.  But  I  am 
going  too  far;  I  am  comparing  simplicity  with  subtlety, 
the  usual  with  the  refined.  Each  man  wrote  as  his  turn  of 
mind  impelled  him,  but  each  expressed  something  more 
than  himself.  Lockhart  was  a  dense,  substantial  Briton, 
with  a  taste  for  the  concrete,  and  Hawthorne  was  a  thin 
New  Englander,  with  a  miasmatic  conscience. 

In  The  Scarlet  Letter  there  is  a  great  deal  of  symbolism ; 
there  is,  I  think,  too  much.  It  is  overdone  at  times,  and 
becomes  mechanical ;  it  ceases  to  be  impressive,  and  grazes 
triviality.  The  idea  of  the  mystic  A  which  the  young 
minister  finds  imprinted  upon  his  breast  and  eating  into 
his  flesh,  in  sympathy  with  the  embroidered  badge  that 
Hester  is  condemned  to  wear,  appears  to  me  to  be  a  case 
6 


114  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

in  point.  This  suggestion  should,  I  think,  have  been  just 
made  and  dropped ;  to  insist  upon  it  and  return  to  it,  is  to 
exaggerate  the  weak  side  of  the  subject.  Hawthorne  re 
turns  to  it  constantly,  plays  with  it,  and  seems  charmed  by 
it ;  until  at  last  the  reader  feels  tempted  to  declare  that  his 
enjoyment  of  it  is  puerile.  In  the  admirable  scene,  so  su 
perbly  conceived  and  beautifully  executed,  in  which  Mr. 
Dimmesdale,  in  the  stillness  of  the  night,  in  the  middle  of 
the  sleeping  town,  feels  impelled  to  go  and  stand  upon  the 
scaffold  where  his  mistress  had  formerly  enacted  her  dread 
ful  penance,  and  then,  seeing  IJester  pass  along  the  street, 
from  watching  at  a  sick-bed,  with  little  Pearl  at  her  side, 
calls  them  both  to  come  and  stand  there  beside  him — in 
this  masterly  episode  the  effect  is  almost  spoiled  by  the 
introduction  of  one  of  these  superficial  conceits.  What 
leads  up  to  it  is  very  fine — so  fine  that  I  cannot  do  better 
than  quote  it  as  a  specimen  of  one  of  the  striking  pages  of 
the  book. 

"  But  before  Mr.  Dimmesdale  had  done  speaking,  a  light 
gleamed  far  and  wide  over  all  the  muffled  sky.  It  was 
doubtless  caused  by  one  of  those  meteors  which  the  night- 
watcher  may  so  often  observe  burning  out  to  waste  in  the 
vacant  regions  of  the  atmosphere.  So  powerful  was  its 
radiance  that  it  thoroughly  illuminated  the  dense  medium 
of  cloud  betwixt  the  sky  and  earth.  The  great  vault  bright 
ened,  like  the  dome  of  an  immense  lamp.  It  showed  the  fa 
miliar  scene  of  the  street  with  the  distinctness  of  mid-day, 
but  also  with  the  awfulness  that  is  always  imparted  to  famil 
iar  objects  by  an  unaccustomed  light.  The  wooden  houses, 
with  their  jutting  stories  and  quaint  gable-peaks;  the  door 
steps  and  thresholds,  with  the  early  grass  springing  up  about 
them;  the  garden-plots,  black  with  freshly -turned  earth; 
the  wheel-track,  little  worn,  and,  even  in  the  market-place, 
margined  with  green  on  either  side ; — all  were  visible,  but 


v.]  THE  THREE  AMERICAN  NOVELS.  115 

with  a  singularity  of  aspect  that  seemed  to  give  another 
moral  interpretation  to  the  things  of  this  world  than  they 
had  ever  borne  before.  And  there  stood  the  minister,  with 
his  hand  over  his  heart ;  and  Hester  Prynne,  with  the  em 
broidered  letter  glimmering  on  her  bosom ;  and  little  Pearl, 
herself  a  symbol,  and  the  connecting  link  between  these  two. 
They  stood  in  the  noon  of  that  strange  and  solemn  splen 
dour,  as  if  it  were  the  light  that  is  to  reveal  all  secrets,  and 
the  daybreak  that  shall  unite  all  that  belong  to  one  another." 

That  is  imaginative,  impressive,  poetic ;  but  when,  al 
most  immediately  afterwards,  the  author  goes  on  to  say 
that  "  the  minister  looking  upward  to  the  zenith,  beheld 
there  the  appearance  of  an  immense  letter — the  letter  A — 
marked  out  in  lines  of  dull  red  light,"  we  feel  that  he 
goes  too  far,  and  is  in  danger  of  crossing  the  line  that  sep 
arates  the  sublime  from  its  intimate  neighbour.  We  are 
tempted  to  say  that  this  is  not  moral  tragedy,  but  physical 
comedy.  In  the  same  way,  too  much  is  made  of  the  in 
timation  that  Hester's  badge  had  a  scorching  property, 
and  that  if  one  touched  it  one  would  immediately  with 
draw  one's  hand.  Hawthorne  is  perpetually  looking  for 
images  which  shall  place  themselves  in  picturesque  cor 
respondence  with  the  spiritual  facts  with  which  he  is  con 
cerned,  and  of  course  the  search  is  of  the  very  essence  of 
poetry.  But  in  such  a  process  discretion  is  everything, 
and  when  the  image  becomes  importunate  it  is  in  danger 
of  seeming  to  stand  for  nothing  more  serious  than  itself. 
When  Hester  meets  the  minister  by  appointment  in  the 
forest,  and  sits  talking  with  him  while  little  Pearl  wanders 
away  and  plays  by  the  edge  of  the  brook,  the  child  is  rep 
resented  as  at  last  making  her  way  over  to  the  other  side 
of  the  woodland  stream,  and  disporting  herself  there  in  a 
manner  which  makes  her  mother  feel  herself,  "  in  some  in- 


116  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

distinct  and  tantalising  manner,  estranged  from  Pearl ;  as 
if  the  child,  in  her  lonely  ramble  through  the  forest,  had 
strayed  out  of  the  sphere  in  which  she  and  her  mother 
dwelt  together,  and  was  now  vainly  seeking  to  return  to 
it."  And  Hawthorne  devotes  a  chapter  to  this  idea  of 
the  child's  having,  by  putting  the  brook  between  Hester 
and  herself,  established  a  kind  of  spiritual  gulf,  on  the 
verge  of  which  her  little  fantastic  person  innocently  mocks 
at  her  mother's  sense  of  bereavement.  This  conception 
belongs,  one  would  say,  quite  to  the  lighter  order  of  a 
story-teller's  devices,  and  the  reader  hardly  goes  with  Haw 
thorne  in  the  large  development  he  gives  to  it.  He  hard 
ly  goes  with  him  either,  I  think,  in  his  extreme  predilec 
tion  for  a  small  number  of  vague  ideas  which  are  repre 
sented  by  such  terms  as  "  sphere "  and  "  sympathies." 
Hawthorne  makes  too  liberal  a  use  of  these  two  substan 
tives  ;  it  is  the  solitary  defect  of  his  style ;  and  it  counts 
as  a  defect  partly  because  the  words  in  question  are  a  sort 
of  specialty  with  certain  writers  immeasurably  inferior  to 
himself. 

I  had  not  meant,  however,  to  expatiate  upon  his  defects, 
which  are  of  the  slenderest  and  most  venial  kind.  The 
Scarlet  Letter  has  the  beauty  and  harmony  of  all  original 
and  complete  conceptions,  and  its  weaker  spots,  whatever 
they  are,  are  not  of  its  essence ;  they  are  mere  light  flaws 
and  inequalities  of  surface.  One  can  often  return  to  it ;  it 
supports  familiarity,  and  has  the  inexhaustible  charm  and 
mystery  of  great  works  of  art.  It  is  admirably  written. 
Hawthorne  afterwards  polished  his  style  to  a  still  higher 
degree ;  but  in  his  later  productions — it  is  almost  always 
the  case  in  a  writer's  later  productions — there  is  a  touch 
of  mannerism.  "In  The  Scarlet  Letter  there  is  a  high  de 
gree  of  polish,  and  at  the  same  time  a  charming  freshness ; 


v.]  THE  THREE  AMERICAN  NOVELS.  117 

his  phrase  is  less  conscious  of  itself.  His  biographer  very 
justly  calls  attention  to  the  fact  that  his  style  was  excel 
lent  from  the  beginning ;  that  he  appeared  to  have  passed 
through  no  phase  of  learning  how  to  write,  but  was  in  pos 
session  of  his  means,  from  the  first,  of  his  handling  a  pen. 
His  early  tales,  perhaps,  were  not  of  a  character  to  subject 
his  faculty  of  expression  to  a  very  severe  test ;  but  a  man 
who  had  not  Hawthorne's  natural  sense  of  language  would 
certainly  have  contrived  to  write  them  less  well.  This  nat 
ural  sense  of  language — this  turn  for  saying  things  lightly 
and  yet  touchingly,  picturesquely  yet  simply,  and  for  in 
fusing  a  gently  colloquial  tone  into  matter  of  the  most 
unfamiliar  import — he  had  evidently  cultivated  with  great 
assiduity.  I  have  spoken  of  the  anomalous  character  of 
his  Note-Books — of  his  going  to  such  pains  often  to  make 
a  record  of  incidents  which  either  were  not  worth  remem 
bering,  or  could  be  easily  remembered  without  its  aid.  But 
it  helps  us  to  understand  the  Note-Books  if  we  regard  them 
as  a  literary  exercise.  They  were  compositions,  as  school 
boys  say,  in  which  the  subject  was  only  the  pretext,  and 
the  main  point  was  to  write  a  certain  amount  of  excellent 
English.  Hawthorne  must  at  least  have  written  a  great 
many  of  these  things  for  practice,  and  he  must  often  have 
said  to  himself  that  it  was  better  practice  to  write  about 
trifles,  because  it  was  a  greater  tax  upon  one's  skill  to  make 
them  interesting.  And  his  theory  was  just,  for  he  has  al 
most  always  made  his  trifles  interesting.  In  his  novels  his 
art  of  saying  things  well  is  very  positively  tested ;  for  here 
he  treats  of  those  matters  among  which  it  is  very  easy  for 
a  blundering  writer  to  go  wrong — the  subtleties  and  mys 
teries  of  life,  the  moral  and  spiritual  maze.  In  such  a  pas 
sage  as  one  I  have  marked  for  quotation  from  The  Scarlet 
Letter,  there  is  the  stamp  of  the  genius  of  style :  — 


118  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

"  Hester  Prynne,  gazing  steadfastly  at  the  clergyman,  felt 
a  dreary  influence  come  over  her,  but  wherefore  or  whence 
she  knew  not,  unless  that  he  seemed  so  remote  from  her  own 
sphere  and  utterly  beyond  her  reach.  One  glance  of  recogni 
tion  she  had  imagined  must  needs  pass  between  them.  She 
thought  of  the  dim  forest,  with  its  little  dell  of  solitude,  and 
love,  and  anguish,  and  the  mossy  tree-trunk,  where,  sitting 
hand  in  hand,  they  had  mingled  their  sad  and  passionate  talk 
with  the  melancholy  murmur  of  the  brook.  How  deeply  had 
they  known  each  other  then !  And  was  this  the  man  ?  She 
hardly  knew  him  now !  He,  moving  proudly  past,  enveloped 
as  it  were  in  the  rich  music,  with  the  procession  of  majestic 
and  venerable  fathers ;  he,  so  unattainable  in  his  worldly  po 
sition,  and  still  more  so  in  that  far  vista  in  his  unsympathis- 
ing  thoughts, through  which  she  now  beheld  him !  Her  spirit 
sank  with  the  idea  that  all  must  have  been  a  delusion,  and  that 
vividly  as  she  had  dreamed  it,  there  could  be  no  real  bond 
betwixt  the  clergyman  and  herself.  And  thus  much  of  wom 
an  there  was  in  Hester,  that  she  could  scarcely  forgive  him — 
least  of  all  now,  when  the  heavy  footstep  of  their  approaching 
fate  might  be  heard,  nearer,  nearer,  nearer ! — for  being  able 
to  withdraw  himself  so  completely  from  their  mutual  world  ; 
while  she  groped  darkly,  and  stretched  forth  her  cold  hands, 
and  found  him  not !" 

The  House  of  the  Seven  Gables  was  written  at  Lenox, 
among  the  mountains  of  Massachusetts,  a  village  nestling, 
rather  loosely,  in  one  of  the  loveliest  corners  of  New  Eng 
land,  to  which  Hawthorne  had  betaken  himself  after  the 
success  of  The  Scarlet  Letter  became  conspicuous,  in  the 
summer  of  1850,  and  where  he  occupied  for  two  years  an 
uncomfortable  little  red  house,  which  is  now  pointed  out 
to  the  inquiring  stranger.  The  inquiring  stranger  is  now 
a  frequent  figure  at  Lenox,  for  the  place  has  suffered  the 
process  of  lionisation.  It  has  become  a  prosperous  water 
ing-place,  or  at  least  (as  there  are  no  waters),  as  they  say  in 


v.]  THE  THKEE  AMERICAN  NOVELS.  119 

America,  a  summer-resort.  It  is  a  brilliant  and  generous 
landscape,  and  thirty  years  ago  a  man  of  fancy,  desiring  to 
apply  himself,  might  have  found  both  inspiration  and  tran 
quillity  there.  Hawthorne  found  so  much  of  both  that 
he  wrote  more  during  his  two  years  of  residence  at  Lenox 
than  at  any  period  of  his  career.  He  began  with  The  House 
of  the  Seven  Gables,  which  was  finished  in  the  early  part 
of  1851.  This  is  the  longest  of  his  three  American  nov 
els;  it  is  the  most  elaborate,  and  in  the  judgment  of  some 
persons  it  is  the  finest.  It  is  a  rich,  delightful,  imagina 
tive  work,  larger  and  more  various  than  its  companions, 
and  full  of  all  sorts  of  deep  intentions,  of  interwoven 
threads  of  suggestion.  But  it  is  not  so  rounded  and 
complete  as  The  Scarlet  Letter ;  it  has  always  seemed  to 
me  more  like  a  prologue  to  a  great  novel  than  a  great 
novel  itself.  I  think  this  is  partly  owing  to  the  fact  that 
the  subject,  the  donnee,  as  the  French  say,  of  the  story, 
does  not  quite  fill  it  out,  and  that  we  get  at  the  same  time 
an  impression  of  certain  complicated  purposes  on  the  au 
thor's  part,  which  seem  to  reach  beyond  it.  I  call  it  larger 
and  more  various  than  its  companions,  and  it  has,  indeed,  a 
greater  richness  of  tone  and  density  of  detail.  The  colour, 
so  to  speak,  of  The  House  of  the  Seven  Gables  is  admira 
ble.  But  the  story  has  a  sort  of  expansive  quality  which 
never  wholly  fructifies,  and  as  I  lately  laid  it  down,  after 
reading  it  for  the  third  time,  I  had  a  sense  of  having  in 
terested  myself  in  a  magnificent  fragment.  Yet  the  book 
has  a  great  fascination ;  and  of  all  of  those  of  its  author's 
productions  which  I  have  read  over  while  writing  this 
sketch,  it  is  perhaps  the  one  that  has  gained  most  by  re- 
persual.  If  it  be  true  of  the  others  that  the  pure,  natural 
quality  of  the  imaginative  strain  is  their  great  merit,  this 
is  at  least  as  true  of  The  House  of  the  Seven  Gables,  the 


120  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

charm  of  which  is  in  a  peculiar  degree  of  the  kind  that 
we  fail  to  reduce  to  its  grounds — like  that  of  the  sweet 
ness  of  a  piece  of  music,  or  the  softness  of  fine  September 
weather.  It  is  vague,  indefinable,  ineffable  ;  but  it  is  the 
sort  of  thing  we  must  always  point  to  in  justification  of 
the  high  claim  that  we  make  for  Hawthorne.  In  this 
case,  of  course,  its  vagueness  is  a  drawback,  for  it  is  diffi 
cult  to  point  to  ethereal  beauties  ;  and  if  the  reader  whom 
we  have  wished  to  inoculate  with  our  admiration  inform 
us,  after  looking  awhile,  that  he  perceives  nothing  in  par 
ticular,  we  can  only  reply  that,  in  effect,  the  object  is  a 
delicate  one. 

The  House  of  the  Seven  Gables  comes  nearer  being  a 
picture  of  contemporary  American  life  than  either  of  its 
companions;  but  on  this  ground  it  would  be  a  mistake  to 
make  a  large  claim  for  it.  It  cannot  be  too  often  repeat 
ed  that  Hawthorne  was  not  a  realist.  He  had  a  high 
sense  of  reality — his  Note-Books  superabundantly  testify 
to  it;  and  fond  as  he  was  of  jotting  down  the  items  that 
make  it  up,  he  never  attempted  to  render  exactly  or  close 
ly  the  actual  facts  of  the  society  that  surrounded  him.  I 
have  said — I  began  by  saying — that  his  pages  were  full  of 
its  spirit,  and  of  a  certain  reflected  light  that  springs  from 
it ;  but  I  was  careful  to  add  that  the  reader  must  look  for 
his  local  and  national  qualities  between  the  lines  of  his 
writing  and  in  the  indirect  testimony  of  his  tone,  his  ac 
cent,  his  temper,  of  his  very  omissions  and  suppressions. 
The  House  of  the  Seven  Gables  has,  however,  more  literal 
actuality  than  the  others,  and  if  it  were  not  too  fanciful  an 
account  of  it,  I  should  say  that  it  renders,  to  an  initiated 
reader,  the  impression  of  a  summer  afternoon  in  an  elm- 
shadowed  New  England  town.  It  leaves  upon  the  mind 
a  vague  correspondence  to  some  such  reminiscence,  and  in 


v.]  THE  THREE  AMERICAN  NOVELS.  121 

stirring  up  the  association  it  renders  it  delightful.  The 
comparison  is  to  the  honour  of  the  New  England  town, 
which  gains  in  it  more  than  it  bestows.  The  shadows  of 
the  elms,  in  The  House  of  the  Seven  Gables,  are  exception 
ally  dense  and  cool;  the  summer  afternoon  is  peculiarly 
still  and  beautiful ;  the  atmosphere  has  a  delicious  warmth, 
and  the  long  daylight  seems  to  pause  and  rest.  But  the 
mild  provincial  quality  is  there,  the  mixture  of  shabbiness 
and  freshness,  the  paucity  of  ingredients.  The  end  of  an 
old  race — this  is  the  situation  that  Hawthorne  has  depict 
ed,  and  he  has  been  admirably  inspired  in  the  choice  of  the 
figures  in  whom  he  seeks  to  interest  us.  They  are  all  fig 
ures  rather  than  characters — they  are  all  pictures  rather 
than  persons.  But  if  their  reality  is  light  and  vague,  it  is 
sufficient,  and  it  is  in  harmony  with  the  low  relief  and 
dimness  of  outline  of  the  objects  that  surrounded  them. 
They  are  all  types,  to  the  author's  mind,  of  something  gen 
eral,  of  something  that  is  bound  up  with  the  history,  at 
large,  of  families  and  individuals,  and  each  of  them  is  the 
centre  of  a  cluster  of  those  ingenious  and  meditative  mus 
ings,  rather  melancholy,  as  a  general  thing,  than  joyous, 
which  melt  into  the  current  and  texture  of  the  story  and 
give  it  a  kind  of  moral  richness.  A  grotesque  old  spin 
ster,  simple,  childish,  penniless,  very  humble  at  heart,  but 
rigidly  conscious  of  her  pedigree;  an  amiable  bachelor, 
of  an  epicurean  temperament  and  an  enfeebled  intellect, 
who  has  passed  twenty  years  of  his  life  in  penal  confine 
ment  for  a  crime  of  which  he  was  unjustly  pronounced 
guilty ;  a  sweet-natured  and  bright-faced  young  girl  from 
the  country,  a  poor  relation  of  these  two  ancient  de 
crepitudes,  with  whose  moral  mustiness  her  modern  fresh 
ness  and  soundness  are  contrasted;  a  young  man  still 
more  modern,  holding  the  latest  opinions,  who  has  sought 
6* 


122  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

his  fortune  up  and  down  the  world,  and,  though  he  has 
not  found  it,  takes  a  genial  and  enthusiastic  view  of  the 
future :  these,  with  two  or  three  remarkable  accessory  fig 
ures,  are  the  persons  concerned  in  the  little  drama.  The 
drama  is  a  small  one,  but  as  Hawthorne  does  not  put  it 
before  us  for  its  own  superficial  sake,  for  the  dry  facts 
of  the  case,  but  for  something  in  it  which  he  holds  to  be 
symbolic  and  of  large  application,  something  that  points  a 
moral  and  that  it  behoves  us  to  remember,  the  scenes  in 
the  rusty  wooden  house  whose  gables  give  its  name  to  the 
story,  have  something  of  the  dignity  both  of  history  and 
of  tragedy.  Miss  Hephzibah  Pyncheon,  dragging  out  a 
disappointed  life  in  her  paternal  dwelling,  finds  herself 
obliged  in  her  old  age  to  open  a  little  shop  for  the  sale 
of  penny  toys  and  gingerbread.  This  is  the  central  inci 
dent  of  the  tale,  and,  as  Hawthorne  relates  it,  it  is  an  inci 
dent  of  the  most  impressive  magnitude  and  most  touching 
interest.  Her  dishonoured  and  vague -minded  brother  is 
released  from  prison  at  the  same  moment,  and  returns  to 
the  ancestral  roof  to  deepen  her  perplexities.  But,  on  the 
other  hand,  to  alleviate  them,  and  to  introduce  a  breath  of 
the  air  of  the  outer  world  into  this  long  unventilated  in 
terior,  the  little  country  cousin  also  arrives,  and  proves  the 
good  angel  of  the  feebly  distracted  household.  All  this 
episode  is  exquisite  —  admirably  conceived  and  executed, 
with  a  kind  of  humorous  tenderness,  an  equal  sense  of 
everything  in  it  that  is  picturesque,  touching,  ridiculous, 
worthy  of  the  highest  praise.  Hephzibah  Pyncheon,  with 
her  near-sighted  scowl,  her  rusty  joints,  her  antique  turban, 
her  map  of  a  great  territory  to  the  eastward  which  ought 
to  have  belonged  to  her  family,  her  vain  terrors,  and  scru 
ples,  and  resentments,  the  inaptitude  and  repugnance  of  an 
ancient  gentlewoman  to  the  vulgar  little  commerce  which 


v.]  THE  THREE  AMERICAN  NOVELS.  123 

a  cruel  fate  has  compelled  her  to  engage  in — Hephzibah 
Pyncheon  is  a  masterly  picture.  I  repeat  that  she  is  a 
picture,  as  her  companions  are  pictures ;  she  is  a  charming 
piece  of  descriptive  writing,  rather  than  a  dramatic  exhi 
bition.  But  she  is  described,  like  her  companions,  too,  so 
subtly  and  lovingly  that  we  enter  into  her  virginal  old 
heart  and  stand  with  her  behind  her  abominable  little 
counter.  Clifford  Pyncheon  is  a  still  more  remarkable 
conception,  though  he  is,  perhaps,  not  so  vividly  depicted. 
It  was  a  figure  needing  a  much  more  subtle  touch,  how 
ever,  and  it  was  of  the  essence  of  his  character  to  be  vague 
and  unemphasised.  Nothing  can  be  more  charming  than 
the  manner  in  which  the  soft,  bright,  active  presence  of 
Phrebe  Pyncheon  is  indicated,  or  than  the  account  of  her 
relations  with  the  poor,  dimly  sentient  kinsman  for  whom 
her  light-handed  sisterly  offices,  in  the  evening  of  a  melan 
choly  life,  are  a  revelation  of  lost  possibilities  of  happiness. 
"  In  her  aspect,"  Hawthorne  says  of  the  young  girl, "  there 
was  a  familiar  gladness,  and  a  holiness  that  you  could  play 
with,  and  yet  reverence  it  as  much  as  ever.  She  was  like 
a  prayer  offered  up  in  the  homeliest  beauty  of  one's  moth 
er-tongue.  Fresh  was  Phoabe,  moreover,  and  airy,  and 
sweet  in  her  apparel ;  as  if  nothing  that  she  wore — nei 
ther  her  gown,  nor  her  small  straw  bonnet,  nor  her  little 
kerchief,  any  more  than  her  snowy  stockings — had  ever 
been  put  on  before ;  or,  if  worn,  were  all  the  fresher  for  it, 
and  with  a  fragrance  as  if  they  had  lain  among  the  rose 
buds."  Of  the  influence  of  her  maidenly  salubrity  upon 
poor  Clifford,  Hawthorne  gives  the  prettiest  description, 
and  then,  breaking  off  suddenly,  renounces  the  attempt  in 
language  which,  while  pleading  its  inadequacy,  conveys  an 
exquisite  satisfaction  to  the  reader.  I  quote  the  passage 
for  the  sake  of  its  extreme  felicity,  and  of  the  charming 
image  with  which  it  concludes. 


124  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

"  But  we  strive  in  vain  to  put  the  idea  into  words.  No 
adequate  expression  of  the  beauty  and  profound  pathos  with 
which  it  impresses  us  is  attainable.  This  being,  made  only 
for  happiness,  and  heretofore  so  miserably  failing  to  be  happy 
— his  tendencies  so  hideously  thwarted  that,  some  unknown 
time  ago,  the  delicate  springs  of  his  character,  never  moral 
ly  or  intellectually  strong,  had  given  way,  and  he  was  now 
imbecile — this  poor  forlorn  voyager  from  the  Islands  of  the 
Blest,  in  a  frail  bark,  on  a  tempestuous  sea,  had  been  flung 
by  the  last  mountain -wave  of  his  shipwreck  into  a  quiet 
harbour.  There,  as  he  lay  more  than  half  lifeless  on  the 
strand,  the  fragrance  of  an  earthly  rose-bud  had  come  to  his 
nostrils,  and,  as  odours  will,  had  summoned  up  reminiscences 
or  visions  of  all  the  living  and  breathing  beauty  amid  which 
he  should  have  had  his  home.  With  his  native  susceptibil 
ity  of  happy  influences,  he  inhales  the  slight  ethereal  rapture 
into  his  soul,  and  expires !" 

I  have  not  mentioned  the  personage  in  The  House  of 
the  Seven  Gables  upon  whom  Hawthorne  evidently  bestow 
ed  most  pains,  and  whose  portrait  is  the  most  elaborate  in 
the  book ;  partly  because  he  is,  in  spite  of  the  space  he 
occupies,  an  accessory  figure,  and  partly  because,  even  more 
than  the  others,  he  is  what  I  have  called  a  picture  rather 
than  a  character.  Judge  Pyncheon  is  an  ironical  portrait, 
very  richly  and  broadly  executed,  very  sagaciously  com 
posed  and  rendered — the  portrait  of  a  superb,  full-blown 
hypocrite,  a  large-based,  full-nurtured  Pharisee,  bland,  ur 
bane,  impressive,  diffusing  about  him  a  "  sultry  "  warmth 
of  benevolence,  as  the  author  calls  it  again  and  again,  and 
basking  in  the  noontide  of  prosperity  and  the  considera 
tion  of  society;  but  in  reality  hard,  gross,  and  ignoble. 
Judge  Pyncheon  is  an  elaborate  piece  of  description,  made 
up  of  a  hundred  admirable  touches,  in  which  satire  is  al 
ways  winged  with  fancy,  and  fancy  is  linked  with  a  deep 


v.]        THE  THREE  AMERICAN  NOVELS.        125 

sense  of  reality.  It  is  difficult  to  say  whether  Hawthorne 
followed  a  model  in  describing  Judge  Pyncheon  ;  but  it  is 
tolerably  obvious  that  the  picture  is  an  impression — a  copi 
ous  impression — of  an  individual.  It  has  evidently  a  defi 
nite  starting-point  in  fact,  and  the  author  is  able  to  draw, 
freely  and  confidently,  after  the  image  established  in  his 
mind.  Holgrave,  the  modern  young  man,  who  has  been  a 
Jack-of-all-trades,  and  is  at  the  period  of  the  story  a  da- 
guerreotypist,  is  an  attempt  to  render  a  kind  of  national 
type — that  of  the  young  citizen  of  the  United  States  whose 
fortune  is  simply  in  his  lively  intelligence,  and  who  stands 
naked,  as  it  were,  unbiased  and  unencumbered  alike,  in  the 
centre  of  the  far-stretching  level  of  American  life.  Hol 
grave  is  intended  as  a  contrast ;  his  lack  of  traditions,  his 
democratic  stamp,  his  condensed  experience,  are  opposed  to 
the  desiccated  prejudices  and  exhausted  vitality  of  the  race 
of  which  poor  feebly-scowling,  rusty-jointed  Hephzibah  is 
the  most  heroic  representative.  It  is,  perhaps,  a  pity  that 
Hawthorne  should  not  have  proposed  to  himself  to  give  the 
old  Pyncheon  qualities  some  embodiment  which  would  help 
them  to  balance  more  fairly  with  the  elastic  properties  of 
the  young  daguerreotypist  —  should  not  have  painted  a 
lusty  conservative  to  match  his  strenuous  radical.  As  it 
is,  the  mustiness  and  mouldiness  of  the  tenants  of  the 
House  of  the  Seven  Gables  crumble  away  rather  too  ea 
sily.  Evidently,  however,  what  Hawthorne  designed  to 
represent  was  not  the  struggle  between  an  old  society  and 
a  new,  for  in  this  case  he  would  have  given  the  old  one  a 
better  chance ;  but  simply,  as  I  have  said,  the  shrinkage 
and  extinction  of  a  family.  This  appealed  to  his  imagina 
tion  ;  and  the  idea  of  long  perpetuation  and  survival  al 
ways  appears  to  have  filled  him  with  a  kind  of  horror  and 
disapproval.  Conservative,  in  a  certain  degree,  as  he  was 


126  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

himself,  and  fond  of  retrospect  and  quietude  and  the  mel 
lowing  influences  of  time,  it  is  singular  how  often  one  en 
counters  in  his  writings  some  expression  of  mistrust  of  old 
houses,  old  institutions,  long  lines  of  descent.  He  was  dis 
posed,  apparently,  to  allow  a  very  moderate  measure  in  these 
respects,  and  he  condemns  the  dwelling  of  the  Pyncheons 
to  disappear  from  the  face  of  the  earth  because  it  has  been 
standing  a  couple  of  hundred  years.  In  this  he  was  an 
American  of  Americans ;  or,  rather,  he  was  more  American 
than  many  of  his  countrymen,  who,  though  they  are  ac 
customed  to  work  for  the  short  run  rather  than  the  long, 
have  often  a  lurking  esteem  for  things  that  show  the  marks 
of  having  lasted.  I  will  add  that  Holgrave  is  one  of  the 
few  figures,  among  those  which  Hawthorne  created,  with 
regard  to  which  the  absence  of  the  realistic  mode  of  treat 
ment  is  felt  as  a  loss.  Holgrave  is  not  sharply  enough  char 
acterised  ;  he  lacks  features ;  he  is  not  an  individual,  but  a 
type.  But  my  last  word  about  this  admirable  novel  must 
not  be  a  restrictive  one.  It  is  a  large  and  generous  pro 
duction,  pervaded  with  that  vague  hum,  that  indefinable 
echo,  of  the  whole  multitudinous  life  of  man,  which  is  the 
real  sign  of  a  great  work  of  fiction. 

After  the  publication  of  The  House  of  the  Seven  Gables, 
which  brought  him  great  honour,  and,  I  believe,  a  tolerable 
share  of  a  more  ponderable  substance,  he  composed  a  couple 
of  little  volumes  for  children  —  The  Wonder-Book,  and  a 
small  collection  of  stories  entitled  Tanglewood  Tales.  They 
are  not  among  his  most  serious  literary  titles,  but  if  I  may 
trust  my  own  early  impression  of  them,  they  are  among 
the  most  charming  literary  services  that  have  been  render 
ed  to  children  in  an  age  (and  especially  in  a  country)  in 
which  the  exactions  of  the  infant  mind  have  exerted  much 
too  palpable  an  influence  upon  literature.  Hawthorne's 


v.]  THE  THREE  AMERICAN  NOVELS.  127 

stones  are  the  old  Greek  myths,  made  more  vivid  to  the 
childish  imagination  by  aji  infusion  of  details  which  both 
deepen  and  explain  their  marvels.  I  have  been  careful  not 
to  read  them  over,  for  I  should  be  very  sorry  to  risk  dis 
turbing  in  any  degree  a  recollection  of  them  that  has  been 
at  rest  since  the  appreciative  period  of  life  to  which  they 
are  addressed.  They  seem  at  that  period  enchanting,  and 
the  ideal  of  happiness  of  many  American  children  is  to 
lie  upon  the  carpet  and  lose  themselves  in  The  Wonder- 
Book.  It  is  in  its  pages  that  they  first  make  the  ac 
quaintance  of  the  heroes  and  heroines  of  the  antique 
mythology,  and  something  of  the  nursery  fairy-tale  qual 
ity  of  interest  which  Hawthorne  imparts  to  them  always 
remains. 

I  have  said  that  Lenox  was  a  very  pretty  place,  and  that 
he  was  able  to  work  there  Hawthorne  proved  by  composing 
The  House  of  the  Seven  Gables  with  a  good  deal  of  rapid 
ity.  But,  at  the  close  of  the  year  in  which  this  novel  was 
published,  he  wrote  to  a  friend  (Mr.  Fields,  his  publisher) 
that,  "  to  tell  you  a  secret,  I  am  sick  to  death  of  Berkshire, 
and  hate  to  think  of  spending  another  winter  here.  .  .  . 
The  air  and  climate  do  not  agree  with  my  health  at  all, 
and  for  the  first  time  since  I  was  a  boy  I  have  felt  languid 
and  dispirited.  .  .  .  O  that  Providence  would  build  me  the 
merest  little  shanty,  and  mark  me  out  a  rood  or  two  of 
garden  ground,  near  the  sea-coast !"  He  was  at  this  time 
for  a  while  out  of  health ;  and  it  is  proper  to  remember 
that  though  the  Massachusetts  Berkshire,  with  its  moun 
tains  and  lakes,  was  charming  during  the  ardent  American 
summer,  there  was  a  reverse  to  the  medal,  consisting  of 
December  snows  prolonged  into  April  and  May.  Provi 
dence  failed  to  provide  him  with  a  cottage  by  the  sea; 
but  he  betook  himself  for  the  winter  of  1852  to  the  little 


128  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

town  of  West  Newton,  near  Boston,  where  he  brought 
into  the  world  The  Blithedale  Romance. 

This  work,  as  I  have  said,  would  not  have  been  written 
if  Hawthorne  had  not  spent  a  year  at  Brook  Farm,  and 
though  it  is  in  no  sense  of  the  word  an  account  of  the 
manners  or  the  inmates  of  that  establishment,  it  will  pre 
serve  the  memory  of  the  ingenious  community  at  West 
Eoxbury  for  a  generation  unconscious  of  other  reminders. 
I  hardly  know  what  to  say  about  it,  save  that  it  is  very 
charming ;  this  vague,  unanalytic  epithet  is  the  first  that 
comes  to  one's  pen  in  treating  of  Hawthorne's  novels,  for 
their  extreme  amenity  of  form  invariably  suggests  it ;  but 
if,  on  the  one  hand,  it  claims  to  be  uttered,  on  the  other  it 
frankly  confesses  its  inconclusiveness.  Perhaps,  however, 
in  this  case  it  fills  out  the  measure  of  appreciation  more 
completely  than  in  others,  for  The  Blithedale  Romance  is 
the  lightest,  the  brightest,  the  liveliest,  of  this  company  of 
unhumorous  fictions. 

The  story  is  told  from  a  more  joyous  point  of  view — 
from  a  point  of  view  comparatively  humorous  —  and  a 
number  of  objects  and  incidents  touched  with  the  light  of 
the  profane  world  —  the  vulgar,  many -coloured  world  of 
actuality,  as  distinguished  from  the  crepuscular  realm  of 
the  writer's  own  reveries  —  are  mingled  with  its  course. 
The  book,  indeed,  is  a  mixture  of  elements,  and  it  leaves  in 
the  memory  an  impression  analogous  to  that  of  an  April 
day — an  alternation  of  brightness  and  shadow,  of  broken 
sun -patches  and  sprinkling  clouds.  Its  denoument  is 
tragical — there  is,  indeed,  nothing  so  tragical  in  all  Haw 
thorne,  unless  it  be  the  murder  of  Miriam's  persecutor  by 
Donatello,  in  Transformation,  as  the  suicide  of  Zenobia ; 
and  yet,  on  the  whole,  the  effect  of  the  novel  is  to  mako 
one  think  more  agreeably  of  life.  The  standpoint  of  the 


v.]  THE  THREE  AMERICAN  NOVELS.  129 

narrator  has  the  advantage  of  being  a  concrete  one ;  he  is 
no  longer,  as  in  the  preceding  tales,  a  disembodied  spirit, 
imprisoned  in  the  haunted  chamber  of  his  own  contempla 
tions,  but  a  particular  man,  with  a  certain  human  grossness. 
Of  Miles  Coverdale  I  have  already  spoken,  and  of  its  be 
ing  natural  to  assume  that,  in  so  far  as  we  may  measure 
this  lightly  indicated  identity  of  his,  it  has  a  great  deal  in 
common  with  that  of  his  creator.  Coverdale  is  a  picture 
of  the  contemplative,  observant,  analytic  nature,  nursing 
its  fancies,  and  yet,  thanks  to  an  element  of  strong  good 
sense,  not  bringing  them  up  to  be  spoiled  children ;  hav 
ing  little  at  stake  in  life,  at  any  given  moment,  and  yet 
indulging,  in  imagination,  in  a  good  many  adventures;  a 
portrait  of  a  man,  in  a  word,  whose  passions  are  slender, 
whose  imagination  is  active,  and  whose  happiness  lies,  not 
in  doing,  but  in  perceiving — half  a  poet,  half  a  critic,  and 
all  a  spectator.  He  is  contrasted  excellently  with  the  fig 
ure  of  Hollingsworth,  the  heavily  treading  Reformer,  whose 
attitude  with  regard  to  the  world  is  that  of  the  hammer  to 
the  anvil,  and  who  has  no  patience  with  his  friend's  indif 
ferences  and  neutralities.  Coverdale  is  a  gentle  sceptic,  a 
mild  cynic ;  he  would  agree  that  life  is  a  little  worth  liv 
ing — or  worth  living  a  little ;  but  would  remark  that,  un 
fortunately,  to  live  little  enough,  we  have  to  live  a  great 
deal.  He  confesses  to  a  want  of  earnestness,  but  in  reali 
ty  he  is  evidently  an  excellent  fellow,  to  whom  one  might 
look,  not  for  any  personal  performance  on  a  great  scale, 
but  for  a  good  deal  of  generosity  of  detail.  "As  Hollings 
worth  once  told  me,  I  lack  a  purpose,"  he  writes,  at  the 
close  of  his  story.  "  How  strange !  He  was  ruined,  mor 
ally,  by  an  overplus  of  the  same  ingredient  the  want  of 
which,  I  occasionally  suspect,  has  rendered  my  own  life 
all  an  emptiness.  I  by  no  means  wish  to  die.  Yet,  were 


130  HAWTHORNE.  .  [CHAP.' 

there  any  cause  in  this  whole  chaos  of  human  struggle 
worth  a  sane  man's  dying  for,  and  which  my  death  would 
benefit,  then — provided,  however,  the  effort  did  not  involve 
an  unreasonable  amount  of  trouble — methinks  I  might  be 
bold  to  offer  up  my  life.  If  Kossuth,  for  example,  would 
pitch  the  battle-field  of  Hungarian  rights  within  an  easy 
ride  of  my  abode,  and  choose  a  mild,  sunny  morning,  after 
breakfast,  for  the  conflict,  Miles  Coverdale  would  gladly 
be  his  man  for  one  brave  rush  upon  the  levelled  bayonets. 
Further  than  that  I  should  be  loth  to  pledge  myself." 

The  finest  thing  in  The  Blithedale  Romance  is  the  char 
acter  of  Zenobia,  which  I  have  said  elsewhere  strikes  me 
as  the  nearest  approach  that  Hawthorne  has  made  to  the 
complete  creation  of  a  person.  She  is  more  concrete  than 
Hester  or  Miriam,  or  Hilda  or  Phrebe ;  she  is  a  more  defi 
nite  image,  produced  by  a  greater  multiplicity  of  touches. 
It  is  idle  to  inquire  too  closely  whether  Hawthorne  had 
Margaret  Fuller  in  his  mind  in  constructing  the  figure  of 
this  brilliant  specimen  of  the  strong-minded  class,  and  en 
dowing  her  with  the  genius  of  conversation  ;  or,  on  the  as 
sumption  that  such  was  the  case,  to  compare  the  image  at 
all  strictly  with  the  model.  There  is  no  strictness  in  the 
representation  by  novelists  of  persons  who  have  struck 
them  in  life,  and  there  can  in  the  nature  of  things  be  none. 
From  the  moment  the  imagination  takes  a  hand  in  the 
game,  the  inevitable  tendency  is  to  divergence,  to  follow 
ing  what  may  be  called  new  scents.  The  original  gives 
hints,  but  the  writer  does  what  he  -likes  with  them,  and 
imports  new  elements  into  the  picture.  If  there  is  this 
amount  of  reason  for  referring  the  wayward  heroine  of 
Blithedale  to  Hawthorne's  impression  of  the  most  distin 
guished  woman  of  her  day  in  Boston  ;  that  Margaret  Fuller 
was  the  only  literary  lady  of  eminence  whom  there  is  any 


y.]  THE  THREE  AMERICAN  NOVELS.  131 

sign  of  his  having  known ;  that  she  was  proud,  passionate, 
and  eloquent ;  that  she  was  much  connected  with  the  little 
world  of  Transcendentalism  out  of  which  the  experiment 
of  Brook  Farm  sprung ;  and  that  she  had  a  miserable  end 
and  a  watery  grave  —  if  these  are  facts  to  be  noted  on 
one  side,  I  say ;  on  the  other,  the  beautiful  and  sumptuous 
Zenobia,  with  her  rich  and  picturesque  temperament  and 
physical  aspects,  offers  many  points  of  divergence  from 
the  plain  and  strenuous  invalid  who  represented  feminine 
culture  in  the  suburbs  of  the  New  England  metropolis. 
This  picturesqueness  of  Zenobia  is  very  happily  indicated 
and  maintained ;  she  is  a  woman  in  all  the  force  of  the 
term,  and  there  is  something  very  vivid  and  powerful  in 
her  large  expression  of  womanly  gifts  and  weaknesses. 
Hollingsworth  is,  I  think,  less  successful,  though  there  is 
much  reality  in  the  conception  of  the  type  to  which  he 
belongs — the  strong-willed,  narrow -hearted  apostle  of  a 
special  form  of  redemption  for  society.  There  is  nothing 
better  in  all  Hawthorne  than  the  scene  between  him  and 
Coverdale,  when  the  two  men  are  at  work  together  in  the 
field  (piling  stones  on  a  dyke),  and  he  gives  it  to  his  com 
panion  to  choose  whether  he  will  be  with  him  or  against 
him.  It  is  a  pity,  perhaps,  to  have  represented  him  as 
having  begun  life  as  a  blacksmith,  for  one  grudges  him 
the  advantage  of  so  logical  a  reason  for  his  roughness  and 
hardness. 

"  Hollingsworth  scarcely  said  a  word,  unless  when  repeat 
edly  and  pertinaciously  addressed.  Then,  indeed,  he  would 
glare  upon  us  from  the  thick  shrubbery  of  his  meditations, 
like  a  tiger  out  of  a  jungle,  make  the  briefest  reply  possible, 
and  betake  himself  back  into  the  solitude  of  his  heart  and 
mind. . . .  His  heart,  I  imagine,  was  never  really  interested  in 
our  socialist  scheme,  but  was  for  ever  busy  with  his  strange 


132  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

and,  as  most  people  thought,  impracticable  plan  for  the  ref 
ormation  of  criminals  through  an  appeal  to  their  higher  in 
stincts.  Much  as  I  liked  Hollingsworth,  it  cost  me  many  a 
groan  to  tolerate  him  on  this  point.  He  ought  to  have  com 
menced  his  investigation  of  the  subject  by  committing  some 
huge  sin  in  his  proper  person,  and  examining  the  condition 
of  his  higher  instincts  afterwards." 

The  most  touching  element  in  the  novel  is  the  history 
of  the  grasp  that  this  barbarous  fanatic  has  laid  upon  the 
fastidious  and  high-tempered  Zenobia,  who,  disliking  him 
and  shrinking  from  him  at  a  hundred  points,  is  drawn  into 
the  gulf  of  his  omnivorous  egotism.  The  portion  of  the 
story  that  strikes  me  as  least  felicitous  is  that  which  deals 
with  Priscilla,  and  with  her  mysterious  relation  to  Zenobia 
— with  her  mesmeric  gifts,  her  clairvoyance,  her  identity 
with  the  Veiled  Lady,  her  divided  subjection  to  Hollings 
worth  and  Westervelt,  and  her  numerous  other  graceful 
but  fantastic  properties  —  her  Sibylline  attributes,  as  the 
author  calls  them.  Hawthorne  is  rather  too  fond  of  Sibyl 
line  attributes — a  taste  of  the  same  order  as  his  disposi 
tion,  to  which  I  have  already  alluded,  to  talk  about  spheres 
and  sympathies.  As  the  action  advances,  in  The  Blithe- 
dale  Romance,  we  get  too  much  out  of  reality,  and  cease 
to  feel  beneath  our  feet  the  firm  ground  of  an  appeal  to 
our  own  vision  of  the  world — our  observation.  I  should 
have  liked  to  see  the  story  concern  itself  more  with  the 
little  community  in  which  its  earlier  scenes  are  laid,  and 
avail  itself  of  so  excellent  an  opportunity  for  describing 
unhackneyed  specimens  of  human  nature.  I  have  already 
spoken  of  the  absence  of  satire  in  the  novel,  of  its  not  aim 
ing  in  the  least  at  satire,  and  of  its  offering  no  grounds  for 
complaint  as  an  invidious  picture.  Indeed,  the  brethren  of 
Brook  Farm  should  have  held  themselves  slighted  rather 


v.]  THE  THREE  AMERICAN  NOVELS.  133 

than  misrepresented,  and  have  regretted  that  the  admirable 
genius  who  for  a  while  was  numbered  among  them  should 
have  treated  their  institution  mainly  as  a  perch  for  start 
ing  upon  an  imaginative  flight.  But  when  all  is  said 
about  a  certain  want  of  substance  and  cohesion  in  the 
latter  portions  of  The  Blithedale  Romance,  the  book  is 
still  a  delightful  and  beautiful  one.  Zenobia  and  Hol- 
lingsworth  live  in  the  memory;  and  even  Priscilla  and 
Coverdale,  who  linger  there  less  importunately,  have  a 
great  deal  that  touches  us  and  that  we  believe  in.  I 
said  just  now  that  Priscilla  was  infelicitous ;  but  immedi 
ately  afterwards  I  open  the  volume  at  a  page  in  which  the 
author  describes  some  of  the  out-of-door  amusements  at 
Blithedale,  and  speaks  of  a  foot-race  across  the  grass,  in 
which  some  of  the  slim  young  girls  of  the  society  joined. 
"  Priscilla's  peculiar  charm  in  a  foot-race  was  the  weakness 
and  irregularity  with  which  she  ran.  Growing  up  without 
exercise,  except  to  her  poor  little  fingers,  she  had  never  yet 
acquired  the  perfect  use  of  her  legs.  Setting  buoyantly 
forth,  therefore,  as  if  no  rival  less  swift  than  Atalanta 
could  compete  with  her,  she  ran  falteringly,  and  often 
tumbled  on  the  grass.  Such  an  incident  —  though  it 
seems  too  slight  to  think  of — was  a  thing  to  laugh  at, 
but  which  brought  the  water  into  one's  eyes,  and  lingered 
in  the  memory  after  far  greater  joys  and  sorrows  were 
wept  out  of  it,  as  antiquated  trash.  Priscilla's  life,  as  I 
beheld  it,  was  full  of  trifles  that  affected  me  in  just  this 
way."  That  seems  to  me  exquisite,  and  the  book  is  full 
of  touches  as  deep  and  delicate. 

After  writing  it,  Hawthorne  went  back  to  live  in  Con 
cord,  where  he  had  bought  a  small  house,  in  which,  appar 
ently,  he  expected  to  spend  a  large  portion  of  his  future. 
This  was,  in  fact,  the  dwelling  in  which  he  passed  that 


134  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

part  of  the  rest  of  his  days  that  he  spent  in  his  own 
country.  He  established  himself  there  before  going  to 
Europe,  in  1853,  and  he  returned  to  the  Wayside,  as  he 
called  his  house,  on  coming  back  to  the  United  States 
seven  years  later.  Though  he  actually  occupied  the  place 
no  long  time,  he  had  made  it  his  property,  and  it  was  more 
his  own  home  than  any  of  his  numerous  provisional  abodes. 
I  may,  therefore,  quote  a  little  account  of  the  house  which 
he  wrote  to  a  distinguished  friend,  Mr.  George  William 
Curtis. 

"  As  for  my  old  house,  you  will  understand  it  better  after 
spending  a  day  or  two  in  it.  Before <  Mr.  Alcott  took  it  in 
hand,  it  was  a  mean-looking  affair,  with  two  peaked  gables  ; 
no  suggestiveness  about  it,  and  no  venerableness,  although 
from  the  style  of  its  construction  it  seems  to  have  survived 
beyond  its  first  century.  He  added  a  porch  in  front,  and  a 
central  peak,  and  a  piazza  at  each  end,  and  painted  it  a  rusty 
olive  hue,  and  invested  the  whole  with  a  modest  picturesque- 
ness  ;  all  which  improvements,  together  with  its  situation  at 
the  foot  of  a  wooded  hill,  make  it  a  place  that  one  notices 
and  remembers  for  a  few  moments  after  passing.  Mr.  Alcott 
expended  a  good  deal  of  taste  and  some  money  (to  no  great 
purpose)  in  forming  the  hillside  behind  the  house  into  ter 
races,  and  building  arbours  and  summer-houses  of  rough  stems, 
and  branches,  and  trees,  on  a  system  of  his  own.  They  must 
have  been  very  pretty  in  their  day,  and  are  so  still,  although 
much  decayed,  and  shattered  more  and  more  by  every  breeze 
that  blows.  The  hillside  is  covered  chiefly  with  locust-trees, 
which  come  into  luxuriant  blossom  in  the  month  of  June, 
and  look  and  smell  very  sweetly,  intermixed  with  a  few 
young  elms,  and  white  pines  and  infant  oaks  —  the  whole 
forming  rather  a  thicket  than  a  wood.  Nevertheless,  there 
is  some  very  good  shade  to  be  found  there.  I  spend  delec 
table  hours  there  in  the  hottest  part  of  the  day,  stretched  out 
at  my  lazy  length,  with  a  book  in  my  hand,  or  some  unwrit- 


v.]  THE  THREE  AMERICAN  NOVELS.  135 

ten  book  in  my  thoughts.  There  is  almost  always  a  breeze 
stirring  along  the  sides  or  brow  of  the  hill.  From  the  hill 
top  there  is  a  good  view  along  the  extensive  level  surfaces 
and  gentle  hilly  outlines,  covered  with  wood,  that  character 
ise  the  scenery  of  Concord.  ...  I  know  nothing  of  the  history 
of  the  house  except  Thoreau's  telling  me  that  it  was  inhabit 
ed,  a  century  or  two  ago,  by  a  man  who  believed  he  should 
never  die.  I  believe,  however,  he  is  dead ;  at  least,  I  hope 
so ;  else  he  may  probably  reappear  and  dispute  my  title  to 
his  residence." 

As  Mr.  Lathrop  points  out,  this  allusion  to  a  man  who 
believed  he  should  never  die  is  "  the  first  intimation  of  the 
story  of  Septimius  Felton"  The  scenery  of  that  romance, 
he  adds,  "  was  evidently  taken  from  the  Wayside  and  its 
hill."  Septimius  Felton  is,  in  fact,  a  young  man  who,  at 
the  time  of  the  war  of  the  Revolution,  lives  in  the  village 
of  Concord,  on  the  Boston  road,  at  the  base  of  a  woody 
hill  which  rises  abruptly  behind  his  house,  and  of  which 
the  level  summit  supplies  him  with  a  promenade  continu 
ally  mentioned  in  the  course  of  the  tale.  Hawthorne  used 
to  exercise  himself  upon  this  picturesque  eminence,  and,  as 
he  conceived  the  brooding  Septimius  to  have  done  before 
him,  to  betake  himself  thither  when  he  found  the  limits  of 
his  dwelling  too  narrow.  But  he  had  an  advantage  which 
his  imaginary  hero  lacked ;  he  erected  a  tower  as  an  ad 
junct  to  the  house,  and  it  was  a  jocular  tradition  among 
his  neighbours,  in  allusion  to  his  attributive  tendency  to 
evade  rather  than  hasten  the  coming  guest,  that  he  used  to 
ascend  this  structure  and  scan  the  road  for  provocations 
to  retreat. 

In  so  far,  however,  as  Hawthorne  suffered  the  penalties 
of  celebrity  at  the  hands  of  intrusive  fellow -citizens,  he 
was  soon  to  escape  from  this  honourable  incommodity. 


136  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

On  the  4th  of  March,  1853,  his  old  college-mate  and  inti 
mate  friend,  Franklin  Pierce,  was  installed  as  President  of 
the  United  States.  He  had  been  the  candidate  of  the 
Democratic  party,  and  all  good  Democrats,  accordingly,  in 
conformity  to  the  beautiful  and  rational  system  under 
which  the  affairs  of  the  great  Republic  were  carried  on, 
began  to  open  their  windows  to  the  golden  sunshine  of 
Presidential  patronage.  When  General  Pierce  was  put 
forward  by  the  Democrats,  Hawthorne  felt  a  perfectly 
loyal  and  natural  desire  that  his  good  friend  should  be 
exalted  to  so  brilliant  a  position,  and  he  did  what  was  in 
him  to  further  the  good  cause,  by  writing  a  little  book 
about  its  hero.  His  Life  of  Franklin  Pierce  belongs  to 
that  class  of  literature  which  is  known  as  the  "  campaign 
biography,"  and  which  consists  of  an  attempt,  more  or  less 
successful,  to  persuade  the  many-headed  monster  of  uni 
versal  suffrage  that  the  gentleman  on  \vhose  behalf  it  is 
addressed  is  a  paragon  of  wisdom  and  virtue.  Of  Haw 
thorne's  little  book  there  is  nothing  particular  to  say,  save 
that  it  is  in  very  good  taste,  that  he  is  a  very  fairly  in 
genious  advocate,  and  that  if  he  claimed  for  the  future 
President  qualities  which  rather  faded  in  the  bright  light 
of  a  high  office,  this  defect  of  proportion  was  essential  to 
his  undertaking.  He  dwelt  chiefly  upon  General  Pierce's 
exploits  in  the  war  with  Mexico  (before  that,  his  record, 
as  they  say  in  America,  had  been  mainly  that  of  a  success 
ful  country  lawyer),  and  exercised  his  descriptive  powers, 
so  far  as  was  possible,  in  describing  the  advance  of  the 
United  States  troops  from  Vera  Cruz  to  the  city  of  the 
Montezumas.  The  mouth-pieces  of  the  Whig  party  spared 
him,  I  believe,  no  reprobation  for  "  prostituting  "  his  ex 
quisite  genius ;  but  I  fail  to  see  anything  reprehensible  in 
Hawthorne's  lending  his  old  friend  the  assistance  of  his 


v.]  THE  THREE  AMERICAN  NOVELS.  137 

graceful  quill.  He  wished  him  to  be  President — he  held 
afterwards  that  he  filled  the  office  with  admirable  dignity 
and  wisdom — and  as  the  only  thing  he  could  do  was  to 
write,  he  fell  to  work  and  wrote  for  him.  Hawthorne 
was  a  good  lover  and  a  very  sufficient  partisan,  and  I  sus 
pect  that  if  Franklin  Pierce  had  been  made  even  less  of 
the  stuff  of  a  statesman,  he  would  still  have  found  in  the 
force  of  old  associations  an  injunction  to  hail  him  as  a 
ruler.  Our  hero  was  an  American  of  the  earlier  and  sim 
pler  type — the  type  of  which  it  is  doubtless  premature  to 
say  that  it  has  wholly  passed  away,  but  of  which  it  may 
at  least  be  said  that  the  circumstances  that  produced  it 
have  been  greatly  modified.  The  generation  to  which  he 
belonged,  that  generation  which  grew  up  with  the  cen 
tury,  witnessed  during  a  period  of  fifty  years  the  immense, 
uninterrupted  material  development  of  the  young  Repub 
lic  ;  and  when  one  thinks  of  the  scale  on  which  it  took 
place,  of  the  prosperity  that  walked  in  its  train  and  waited 
on  its  course,  of  the  hopes  it  fostered  and  the  blessings  it 
conferred — of  the  broad  morning  sunshine,  in  a  word,  in 
which  it  all  went  forward — there  seems  to  be  little  room 
for  surprise  that  it  should  have  implanted  a  kind  of  super 
stitious  faith  in  the  grandeur  of  the  country,  its  duration, 
its  immunity  from  the  usual  troubles  of  earthly  empires. 
This  faith  was  a  simple  and  uncritical  one,  enlivened  with 
an  element  of  genial  optimism,  in  the  light  of  which  it 
appeared  that  the  great  American  state  was  not  as  other 
human  institutions  are,  that  a  special  Providence  watched 
over  it,  that  it  would  go  on  joyously  forever,  and  that  a 
country  whose  vast  and  blooming  bosom  offered  a  refuge 
to  the  strngglers  and  seekers  of  all  the  rest  of  the  world, 
must  come  off  easily,  in  the  battle  of  the  ages.  From  this 
conception  of  the  American  future  the  sense  of  its  having 
7 


138  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

problems  to  solve  was  blissfully  absent;  there  were  no 
difficulties  in  the  programme,  no  looming  complications, 
no  rocks  ahead.  The  indefinite  multiplication  of  the 
population,  and  its  enjoyment  of  the  benefits  of  a  com 
mon-school  education  and  of  unusual  facilities  for  making 
an  income — this  was  the  form  in  which,  on  the  whole,  the 
future  most  vividly  presented  itself,  and  in  which  the  great 
ness  of  the  country  was  to  be  recognised  of  men.  There 
was,  indeed,  a  faint  shadow  in  the  picture  —  the  shadow 
projected  by  the  "  peculiar  institution  "  of  the  Southern 
States ;  but  it  was  far  from  sufficient  to  darken  the  rosy 
vision  of  most  good  Americans,  and,  above  all,  of  most 
good  Democrats.  Hawthorne  alludes  to  it  in  a  passage 
of  his  life  of  Pierce,  which  I  will  quote,  not  only  as  a  hint 
of  the  trouble  that  was  in  store  for  a  cheerful  race  of  men, 
but  as  an  example  of  his  own  easy-going  political  attitude. 

"It  was  while  in  the  Lower  House  of  Congress  that 
Franklin  Pierce  took  that  stand  on  the  Slavery  question 
from  which  he  has  never  since  swerved  by  a  hair's  breadth. 
He  fully  recognised,  by  his  votes  and  his  voice,  the  rights 
pledged  to  the  South  by  the  Constitution.  This,  at  the 
period  when  he  declared  himself,  was  an  easy  thing  to  do. 
But  when  it  became  more  difficult,  when  the  first  impercepti 
ble  murmur  of  agitation  had  grown  almost  to  a  convulsion, 
his  course  was  still  the  same.  Nor  did  he  ever  shun  the 
obloquy  that  sometimes  threatened  to  pursue  the  Northern 
man  who  dared  to  love  that  great  and  sacred  reality— his 
whole  united  country — better  than  the  mistiness  of  a  philan 
thropic  theory." 

This  last  invidious  allusion  is  to  the  disposition,  not  in 
frequent  at  the  North,  but  by  no  means  general,  to  set  a 
decisive  limit  to  further  legislation  in  favour  of  the  cherish 
ed  idiosyncrasy  of  the  other  half  of  the  country.  Haw- 


v.]  THE  THREE  AMERICAN  NOVELS.  139 

thorne  takes  the  license  of  a  sympathetic  biographer  in 
speaking  of  his  hero's  having  incurred  obloquy  by  his 
conservative  attitude  on  the  question  of  Slavery.  The 
only  class  in  the  American  world  that  suffered  in  the 
smallest  degree,  at  this  time,  from  social  persecution,  was 
the  little  band  of  Northern  Abolitionists,  who  were  as 
unfashionable  as  they  were  indiscreet  —  which  is  saying 
much.  Like  most  of  his  fellow-countrymen,  Hawthorne 
had  no  idea  that  the  respectable  institution  which  he  con 
templated  in  impressive  contrast  to  humanitarian  "misti 
ness,"  was  presently  to  cost  the  nation  four  long  years  of 
bloodshed  and  misery,  and  a  social  revolution  as  complete 
as  any  the  world  has  seen.  When  this  event  occurred,  he 
was,  therefore,  proportionately  horrified  and  depressed  by 
it ;  it  cut  from  beneath  his  feet  the  familiar  ground  which 
had  long  felt  so  firm,  substituting  a  heaving  and  quaking 
medium  in  which  his  spirit  found  no  rest.  Such  was  the 
bewildered  sensation  of  that  earlier  and  simpler  generation 
of  which  I  have  spoken ;  their  illusions  were  rudely  dis 
pelled,  and  they  saw  the  best  of  all  possible  republics  giv 
en  over  to  fratricidal  carnage.  This  affair  had  no  place  in 
their  scheme,  and  nothing  was  left  for  them  but  to  hang 
their  heads  and  close  their  eyes.  The  subsidence  of  that 
great  convulsion  has  left  a  different  tone  from  the  tone  it 
found,  and  one  may  say  that  the  Civil  War  marks  an  era 
in  the  history  of  the  American  mind.  It  introduced  into 
the  national  consciousness  a  certain  sense  of  proportion 
and  relation,  of  the  world  being  a  more  complicated  place 
than  it  had  hitherto  seemed,  the  future  more  treacherous, 
success  more  difficult.  At  the  rate  at  which  things  are 
going,  it  is  obvious  that  good  Americans  will  be  more  nu 
merous  than  ever;  but  the  good  American,  in  days  to 
come,  will  be  a  more  critical  person  than  his  complacent 


140  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

and  confident  grandfather.  He  has  eaten  of  the  tree  of 
knowledge.  He  will  not,  I  think,  be  a  sceptic,  and  still 
less,  of  course,  a  cynic ;  but  he  will  be,  without  discredit 
to  his  well-known  capacity  for  action,  an  observer.  He 
will  remember  that  the  ways  of  the  Lord  are  inscrutable, 
and  that  this  is  a  world  in  which  everything  happens ; 
and  eventualities,  as  the  late  Emperor  of  the  French  used 
to  say,  will  not  find  him  intellectually  unprepared.  The 
good  American  of  which  Hawthorne  was  so  admirable  a 
specimen  was  not  critical,  and  it  was  perhaps  for  this  rea 
son  that  Franklin  Pierce  seemed  to  him  a  very  proper 
President. 

The  least  that  General  Pierce  could  do  in  exchange  for 
so  liberal  a  confidence  was  to  offer  his  old  friend  one  of 
the  numerous  places  in  his  gift.  Hawthorne  had  a  great 
desire  to  go  abroad  and  see  something  of  the  world,  so 
that  a  consulate  seemed  the  proper  thing.  He  never  stir 
red  in  the  matter  himself,  but  his  friends  strongly  urged 
that  something  should  be  done;  and  when  he  accepted 
the  post  of  consul  at  Liverpool  there  was  not  a  word  of 
reasonable  criticism  to  be  offered  on  the  matter.  If  Gen 
eral  Pierce,  who  was  before  all  things  good-natured  and 
obliging,  had  been  guilty  of  no  greater  indiscretion  than 
to  confer  this  modest  distinction  upon  the  most  honourable 
and  discreet  of  men  of  letters,  he  would  have  made  a  more 
brilliant  mark  in  the  annals  of  American  statesmanship. 
Liverpool  had  not  been  immediately  selected,  and  Haw 
thorne  had  written  to  his  friend  and  publisher,  Mr.  Fields, 
with  some  humorous  vagueness  of  allusion  to  his  probable 
expatriation. 

"  Do  make  some  inquiries  about  Portugal ;  as,  for  instance, 
in  what  part  of  the  world  it  lies,  and  whether  it  is  an  empire, 
a  kingdom,  or  a  republic.  Also,  and  more  particularly,  the 


v.]  THE  THREE  AMERICAN  NOVELS.  141 

expenses  of  living  there,  and  whether  the  Minister  would  be 
likely  to  be  much  pestered  with  his  own  countrymen.  Also, 
any  other  information  about  foreign  countries  would  be  ac 
ceptable  to  an  inquiring  mind." 

It  would  seem  from  this  that  there  had  been  a  question 
of  offering  him  a  small  diplomatic  post ;  but  the  emolu 
ments  of  the  place  were  justly  taken  into  account,  and  it 
is  to  be  supposed  that  those  of  the  consulate  at  Liverpool 
were  at  least  as  great  as  the  salary  of  the  American  repre 
sentative  at  Lisbon.  Unfortunately,  just  after  Hawthorne 
had  taken  possession  of  the  former  post,  the  salary  attach 
ed  to  it  was  reduced  by  Congress,  in  an  economical  hour, 
to  less  than  half  the  sum  enjoyed  by  his  predecessors.  It 
was  fixed  at  $7,500  (£1,500) ;  but  the  consular  fees,  which 
were  often  copious,  were  an  added  resource.  At  midsum 
mer  then,  in  1853,  Hawthorne  was  established  in  England. 


CHAPTER  VI. 

ENGLAND    AND    ITALY. 

HAWTHORNE  was  close  upon  fifty  years  of  age  when  he 
came  to  Europe — a  fact  that  should  be  remembered  when 
those  impressions  which  he  recorded  in  five  substantial 
volumes  (exclusive  of  the  novel  written  in  Italy),  occasion 
ally  affect  us  by  the  rigidity  of  their  point  of  view.  His 
Note-Books,  kept  during  his  residence  in  England,  his  two 
winters  in  Rome,  his  summer  in  Florence,  were  published 
after  his  death ;  his  impressions  of  England,  sifted,  re 
vised,  and  addressed  directly  to  the  public,  he  gave  to  the 
world  shortly  before  this  event.  The  tone  of  his  Euro 
pean  Diaries  is  often  so  fresh  and  unsophisticated  that  we 
find  ourselves  thinking  of  the  writer  as  a  young  man,  and 
it  is  only  a  certain  final  sense  of  something  reflective  and 
a  trifle  melancholy  that  reminds  us  that  the  simplicity 
which  is,  on  the  whole,  the  leading  characteristic  of  their 
pages  is,  though  the  simplicity  of  inexperience,  not  that 
of  youth.  When  I  say  inexperience,  I  mean  that  Haw 
thorne's  experience  had  been  narrow.  His  fifty  years  had 
been  spent,  for  much  the  larger  part,  in  small  American 
towns — Salem,  the  Boston  of  forty  years  ago,  Concord, 
Lenox,  West  Newton  —  and  he  had  led  exclusively  what 
one  may  call  a  village  life.  This  is  evident,  not  at  all  di 
rectly  and  superficially,  but  by  implication  and  between 


CHAP,  vi.]  ENGLAND  AND  ITALY.  143 

the  lines,  in  his  desultory  history  of  his  foreign  years.  In 
other  words,  and  to  call  things  by  their  names,  he  was  ex 
quisitely  and  consistently  provincial.  I  suggest  this  fact 
not  in  the  least  in  condemnation,  but,  on  the  contrary,  in 
support  of  an  appreciative  view  of  him.  I  know  nothing 
more  remarkable,  more  touching,  than  the  sight  of  this 
odd,  youthful-elderly  mind,  contending  so  late  in  the  day 
with  new  opportunities  for  learning  old  things,  and,  on  the 
whole,  profiting  by  them  so  freely  and  gracefully.  The 
Note-Books  are  provincial,  and  so,  in  a  greatly  modified 
degree,  are  the  sketches  of  England,  in  Our  Old  Home ; 
but  the  beauty  and  delicacy  of  this  latter  work  are  so  in 
terwoven  with  the  author's  air  of  being  remotely  outside  of 
everything  he  describes,  that  they  count  for  more,  seem 
more  themselves,  and  finally  give  the  whole  thing  the  ap 
pearance  of  a  triumph,  not  of  initiation,  but  of  the  provin 
cial  point  of  view  itself. 

I  shall  not  attempt  to  relate  in  detail  the  incidents  of 
his  residence  in  England.  He  appears  to  have  enjoyed 
it  greatly,  in  spite  of  the  deficiency  of  charm  in  the  place 
to  which  his  duties  chiefly  confined  him.  His  confine 
ment,  however,  was  not  unbroken,  and  his  published  Jour 
nals  consist  largely  of  minute  accounts  of  little  journeys  and 
wanderings,  with  his  wife  and  his  three  children,  through 
the  rest  of  the  country;  together  with  much  mention  of 
numerous  visits  to  London,  a  city  for  whose  dusky  im 
mensity  and  multitudinous  interest  he  professed  the  high 
est  relish.  His  Note-Books  are  of  the  same  cast  as  the 
two  volumes  of  his  American  Diaries,  of  which  I  have 
given  some  account — chiefly  occupied  with  external  mat 
ters,  with  the  accidents  of  daily  life,  with  observations 
made  during  the  long  walks  (often  with  his  son)  which 
formed  his  most  valued  pastime.  His  office,  moreover, 


144  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

though  Liverpool  was  not  a  delectable  home,  furnished 
him  with  entertainment  as  well  as  occupation,  and  it  may 
almost  be  said  that  during  these  years  he  saw  more  of  his 
fellow-countrymen,  in  the  shape  of  odd  wanderers,  peti 
tioners,  and  inquirers  of  every  kind,  than  he  had  ever  done 
in  his  native  land.  The  paper  entitled  "  Consular  Experi 
ences,"  in  Our  Old  Home,  is  an  admirable  recital  of  these 
observations,  and  a  proof  that  the  novelist  might  have 
found  much  material  in  the  opportunities  of  the  consul. 
On  his  return  to  America,  in  1860,  he  drew  from  his 
Journal  a  number  of  pages  relating  to  his  observations  in 
England,  re-wrote  them  (with,  I  should  suppose,  a  good 
deal  of  care),  and  converted  them  into  articles  which  he 
published  in  a  magazine.  These  chapters  were  afterwards 
collected,  and  Our  Old  Home  (a  rather  infelicitous  title) 
was  issued  in  1863.  I  prefer  to  speak  of  the  book  now, 
however,  rather  than  in  touching  upon  the  closing  years  of 
his  life,  for  it  is  a  kind  of  deliberate  resume  of  his  impres 
sions  of  the  land  of  his  ancestors.  "It  is  not  a  good  or 
a  weighty  book,"  he  wrote  to  his  publisher,  who  had  sent 
him  some  reviews  of  it,  "nor  does  it  deserve  any  great 
amount  of  praise  or  censure.  I  don't  care  about  seeing 
any  more  notices  of  it."  Hawthorne's  appreciation  of  his 
own  productions  was  always  extremely  just;  he  had  a 
sense  of  the  relations  of  things,  which  some  of  his  admir 
ers  have  not  thought  it  well  to  cultivate ;  and  he  never  ex 
aggerated  his  own  importance  as  a  writer.  Our  Old  Home 
is  not  a  weighty  book ;  it  is  decidedly  a  light  one.  But 
when  he  says  it  is  not  a  good  one,  I  hardly  know  what  he 
means,  and  his  modesty  at  this  point  is  in  excess  of  his  dis 
cretion.  Whether  good  or  not,  Our  Old  Home  is  charm 
ing — it  is  most  delectable  reading.  The  execution  is  sin 
gularly  perfect  and  ripe ;  of  all  his  productions  it  seems  to 


vi.]  ENGLAND  AND  ITALY.  145 

be  the  best  written.  The  touch,  as  musicians  say,  is  ad 
mirable  ;  the  lightness,  the  fineness,  the  felicity  of  charac 
terisation  and  description,  belong  to  a  man  who  has  the 
advantage  of  feeling  delicately.  His  judgment  is  by  no 
means  always  sound ;  it  often  rests  on  too  narrow  an  obser 
vation.  But  his  perception  is  of  the  keenest,  and  though 
it  is  frequently  partial,  incomplete,  it  is  excellent  as  far  as 
it  goes.  The  book  gave  but  limited  satisfaction,  I  believe, 
in  England,  and  I  am  not  sure  that  the  failure  to  enjoy 
certain  manifestations  of  its  sportive  irony  has  not  chilled 
the  appreciation  of  its  singular  grace.  That  English  read 
ers,  on  the  whole,  should  have  felt  that  Hawthorne  did  the 
national  mind  and  manners  but  partial  justice,  is,  I  think, 
conceivable  ;  at  the  same  time  that  it  seems  to  me  remark 
able  that  the  tender  side  of  the  book,  as  I  may  call  it, 
should  not  have  carried  it  off  better.  It  abounds  in  pas 
sages  more  delicately  appreciative  than  can  easily  be  found 
elsewhere,  and  it  contains  more  charming  and  affectionate 
things  than,  I  should  suppose,  had  ever  before  been  written 
about  a  country  not  the  writer's  own.  To  say  that  it  is 
an  immeasurably  more  exquisite  and  sympathetic  work 
than  any  of  the  numerous  persons  who  have  related  their 
misadventures  in  the  United  States  have  seen  fit  to  de 
vote  to  that  country,  is  to  say  but  little,  and  I  imagine 
that  Hawthorne  had  in  mind  the  array  of  English  voy 
agers —  Mrs.  Trollope,  Dickens,  Marryat,  Basil  Hall,  Miss 
Martineau,  Mr.  Grattan — when  he  reflected  that  everything 
is  relative,  and  that,  as  such  books  go,  his  own  little  volume 
observed  the  amenities  of  criticism.  He  certainly  had  it 
in  mind  when  he  wrote  the  phrase  in  his  preface  relat 
ing  to  the  impression  the  book  might  make  in  England. 
"  Not  an  Englishman  of  them  all  ever  spared  America  for 
courtesy's  sake  or  kindness ;  nor,  in  my  opinion,  would  it 
7* 


146  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

contribute  in  the  least  to  any  mutual  advantage  and  com 
fort  if  we  were  to  besmear  each  other  all  over  with  butter 
and  honey."  I  am  far  from  intending  to  intimate  that  the 
vulgar  instinct  of  recrimination  had  anything  to  do  with 
the  restrictive  passages  of  Our  Old  Home ;  I  mean  sim 
ply,  that  the  author  had  a  prevision  that  his  collection  of 
sketches  would  in  some  particulars  fail  to  please  his  Eng 
lish  friends.  He  professed,  after  the  event,  to  have  dis 
covered  that  the  English  are  sensitive,  and  as  they  say  of 
the  Americans,  for  whose  advantage  I  believe  the  term 
was  invented,  thin  skinned.  "  The  English  critics,"  he 
wrote  to  his  publisher,  "seem  to  think  me  very  bitter 
against  their  countrymen,  and  it  js  perhaps  natural  that 
they  should,  because  their  self-conceit  can  accept  nothing 
short  of  indiscriminate  adulation ;  but  I  really  think  that 
Americans  have  much  more  cause  than  they  to  complain 
of  me.  Looking  over  the  volume,  I  am  rather  surprised  to 
find  that,  whenever  I  draw  a  comparison  between  the  two 
people,  I  almost  invariably  cast  the  balance  against  our 
selves."  And  he  writes  at  another  time : — "  I  received 
several  private  letters  and  printed  notices  of  Our  Old 
Home  from  England.  It  is  laughable  to  see  the  innocent 
wonder  with  which  they  regard  my  criticisms,  accounting 
for  them  by  jaundice,  insanity,  jealousy,  hatred,  on  my 
part,  and  never  admitting  the  least  suspicion  that  there 
may  be  a  particle  of  truth  in  them.  The  monstrosity  of 
their  self-conceit  is  such  that  anything  short  of  unlimited 
admiration  impresses  them,  as  malicious  caricature.  But 
they  do  me  great  injustice  in  supposing  that  I  hate  them. 
I  would  as  soon  hate  my  own  people."  The  idea  of  his 
hating  the  English  was  of  course  too  puerile  for  discus 
sion  ;  and  the  book,  as  I  have  said,  is  full  of  a  rich  appre 
ciation  of  the  finest  characteristics  of  the  country.  But 


vi.]  ENGLAND  AND  ITALY.  147 

it  has  a  serious  defect — a  defect  which  impairs  its  value, 
though  it  helps  to  give  consistency  to  such  an  image  of 
Hawthorne's  personal  nature  as  we  may  by  this  time  have 
been  able  to  form.  It  is  the  work  of  an  outsider,  of  a 
stranger,  of  a  man  who  remains  to  the  end  a  mere  specta 
tor  (something  less  even  than  an  observer),  and  always  lacks 
the  final  initiation  into  the  manners  and  nature  of  a  peo 
ple  of  whom  it  may  most  be  said,  among  all  the  people  of 
the  -earth,  that  to  know  them  is  to  make  discoveries.  Haw 
thorne  freely  confesses  to  this  constant  exteriority,  and  ap 
pears  to  have  been  perfectly  conscious  of  it.  "  I  remem 
ber,"  he  writes  in  the  sketch  of  "  A  London  Suburb,"  in 
Our  Old  Home — "  I  remember  to  this  day  the  dreary  feel 
ing  with  which  I  sat  by  our  first  English  fireside  and 
watched  the  chill  and  rainy  twilight  of  an  autumn  day 
darkening  down  upon  the  garden,  while  the  preceding  oc 
cupant  of  the  house  (evidently  a  most  unamiable  person 
age  in  his  lifetime),  scowled  inhospitably  from  above  the 
mantel-piece,  as  if  indignant  that  an  American  should  try 
to  make  himself  at  home  there.  Possibly  it  may  appease 
his  sulky  shade  to  know  that  I  quitted  his  abode  as  much 
a  stranger  as  I  entered  it."  The  same  note  is  struck  in  an 
entry  in  his  Journal,  of  the  date  of  October  6th,  1854. 

"The  people,  for  several  days,  have  been  in  the  utmost 
anxiety,  and  latterly  in  the  highest  exultation,  about  Se- 
bastopol — and  all  England,  and  Europe  to  boot,  have  been 
fooled  by  the  belief  that  it  had  fallen.  This,  however,  now 
turns  out  to  be  incorrect ;  and  the  public  visage  is  some 
what  grim  in  consequence.  I  ani  glad  of  it.  In  spite  of  his 
actual  sympathies,  it  is  impossible  for  an  American  to  be 
otherwise  than  glad.  Success  makes  an  Englishman  intoler 
able,  and  already,  on  the  mistaken  idea  that  the  way  was 
open  to  a  prosperous  conclusion  of  the  war,  the  Times  had 


148  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

begun  to  throw  out  menaces  against  America.  I  shall  never 
love  England  till  she  sues  to  us  for  help,  and,  in  the  mean 
time,  the  fewer  triumphs  she  obtains,  the  better  for  all  par 
ties.  An  Englishman  in  adversity  is  a  very  respectable 
character ;  he  does  not  lose  his  dignity,  but  merely  comes  to 
a  proper  conception  of  himself.  ...  I  seem  to  myself  like  a 
spy  or  traitor  when  I  meet  their  eyes,  and  am  conscious  that 
I  neither  hope  nor  fear  in  sympathy  with  them,  although 
they  look  at  me  in  full  confidence  of  sympathy.  Their  heart 
'  knoweth  its  own  bitterness ;'  and  as  for  me,  being  a  stran 
ger  and  an  alien,  I '  intermeddle  not  with  their  joy.'  " 

This  seems  to  me  to  express  very  well  the  weak  side 
of  Hawthorne's  work  —  his  constant  mistrust  and  suspi 
cion  of  the  society  that  surrounded  him,  his  exaggerated, 
painful,  morbid  national  consciousness.  It  is,  I  think,  an 
indisputable  fact  that  Americans  are,  as  Americans,  the 
most  self-conscious  people  in  the  world,  and  the  most  ad 
dicted  to  the  belief  that  the  other  nations  of  the  earth  arc 
in  a  conspiracy  to  undervalue  them.  They  are  conscious 
of  being  the  youngest  of  the  great  nations,  of  not  being 
of  the  European  family,  of  being  placed  on  the  circum 
ference  of  the  circle  of  civilisation  rather  than  at  the  cen 
tre,  of  the  experimental  element  not  having  as  yet  entirely 
dropped  out  of  their  great  political  undertaking.  The 
sense  of  this  relativity,  in  a  word,  replaces  that  quiet  and 
comfortable  sense  of  the  absolute,  as  regards  its  own  posi 
tion  in  the  world,  which  reigns  supreme  in  the  British  and 
in  the  Gallic  genius.  Few  persons,  I  think,  can  have  min 
gled  much  with  Americans  in  Europe  without  having 
made  this  reflection,  and  it  is  in  England  that  their  habit 
of  looking  askance  at  foreign  institutions — of  keeping  one 
eye,  as  it  were,  on  the  American  personality,  while  with 
the  other  they  contemplate  these  objects — is  most  to  be 


VL]  ENGLAND  AND  ITALY.  149 

observed.  Add  to  this  that  Hawthorne  came  to  England 
late  in  life,  when  his  habits,  his  tastes,  his  opinions,  were 
already  formed,  that  he  was  inclined  to  look  at  things  in 
silence  and  brood  over  them  gently,  rather  than  talk  about 
them,  discuss  them,  grow  acquainted  with  them  by  ac 
tion  ;  and  it  will  be  possible  to  form  an  idea  of  our 
writer's  detached  and  critical  attitude  in  the  country  in 
which  it  is  easiest,  thanks  to  its  aristocratic  constitution, 
to  the  absence  of  any  considerable  public  fund  of  enter 
tainment  and  diversion,  to  the  degree  in  which  the  inex 
haustible  beauty  and  interest  of  the  place  are  private  prop 
erty,  demanding  constantly  a  special  introduction — in  the 
country  in  which,  I  say,  it  is  easiest  for  a  stranger  to  re 
main  a  stranger.  For  a  stranger  to  cease  to  be  a  stranger 
he  must  stand  ready,  as  the  French  say,  to  pay  with  his 
person ;  and  this  was  an  obligation  that  Hawthorne  was 
indisposed  to  incur.  Our  sense,  as  we  read,  that  his  reflec 
tions  are  those  of  a  shy  and  susceptible  man,  with  nothing 
at  stake,  mentally,  in  his  appreciation  of  the  country,  is, 
therefore,  a  drawback  to  our  confidence ;  but  it  is  not  a 
drawback  sufficient  to  make  it  of  no  importance  that  he 
•  is  at  the  same  time  singularly  intelligent  and  discrimi 
nating,  with  a  faculty  of  feeling  delicately  and  justly, 
which  constitutes  in  itself  an  illumination.  There  is  a 
passage  in  the  sketch  entitled  About  Warwick  which  is  a 
very  good  instance  of  what  was  probably  his  usual  state 
of  mind.  He  is  speaking  of  the  aspect  of  the  High  Street 
of  the  town. 

"  The  street  is  an  emblem  of  England  itself.  What  seems 
new  in  it  is  chiefly  a  skilful  and  fortunate  adaptation  of 
what  such  a  people  as  ourselves  would  destroy.  The  new 
things  are  based  and  supported  on  sturdy  old  things,  and 
derive  a  massive  strength  from  their  deep  and  immemorial 


150  HAWTHOKNE.  [CHAP. 

foundations,  though  with  such  limitations  and  impediments 
as  only  an  Englishman  could  endure.  But  he  likes  to  feel 
the  weight  of  all  the  past  upon  his  back  ;  and,  moreover,  the 
antiquity  that  overburdens  him  has  taken  root  in  his  being, 
and  has  grown  to  be  rather  a  hump  than  a  pack,  so  that 
there  is  no  getting  rid  of  it  without  tearing  his  whole  struct 
ure  to  pieces.  In  my  judgment,  as  he  appears  to  be  suffi 
ciently  comfortable  under  the  mouldy  accretion,  he  had  bet 
ter  stumble  on  with  it  as  long  as  he  can.  He  presents  a  spec 
tacle  which  is  by  no  means  without  its  charm  for  a  disin 
terested  and  unincumbered  observer." 

There  is  all  Hawthorne,  with  his  enjoyment  of  the 
picturesque,  his  relish  of  chiaroscuro,  of  local  colour,  of 
the  .deposit  of  time,  and  his  still  greater  enjoyment  of 
his  own  dissociation  from  these  things,  his  "disinterest 
ed  and  unincumbered"  condition.  His  want  of  incum- 
brances  may  seem  at  times  to  give  him  a  somewhat  naked 
and  attenuated  appearance,  but,  on  the  whole,  he  carries  it 
off  very  well.  I  have  said  that  Our  Old  Home  contains 
much  of  his  best  writing,  and  on  turning  over  the  book  at 
hazard,  I  am  struck  with  his  frequent  felicity  of  phrase. 
At  every  step  there  is  something  one  would  like  to  quote 
— something  excellently  well  said.  These  things  are  often 
of  the  lighter  sort,  but  Hawthorne's  charming  diction  lin 
gers  in  the  memory — almost  in  the  ear.  I  have  always 
remembered  a  certain  admirable  characterisation  of  Doc 
tor  Johnson,  in  the  account  of  the  writer's  visit  to  Lich- 
field — and  I  will  preface  it  by  a  paragraph  almost  as  good, 
commemorating  the  charms  of  the  hotel  in  that  interesting 
town. 

"  At  any  rate,  I  had  the  great,  dull,  dingy,  and  dreary  cof 
fee-room,  with  its  heavy  old  mahogany  chairs  and  tables, 
all  to  myself,  and  not  a  soul  to  exchange  a  word  with  except 


TL]  ENGLAND  AND  ITALY.  151 

the  waiter,  who,  like  most  of  his  class  in  England,  had  evi 
dently  left  his  conversational  abilities  uncultivated.  No 
former  practice  of  solitary  living,  nor  habits  of  reticence, 
nor  well-tested  self-dependence  for  occupation  of  mind  and 
amusement,  can  quite  avail,  as  I  now  proved,  to  dissipate  the 
ponderous  gloom  of  an  English  coffee-room  under  such  cir 
cumstances  as  these,  with  no  book  at  hand  save  the  county 
directory,  nor  any  newspaper  but  a  torn  local  journal  of  five 
days  ago.  So  I  buried  m3rself  betimes  in  a  huge  heap  of  an 
cient  feathers  (there  is  no  other  kind  of  bed  in  these  old  inns), 
let  my  head  sink  into  an  unsubstantial  pillow,  and  slept  a 
stifled  sleep,  compounded  of  the  night -troubles  of  all  my 
predecessors  in  that  same  unrestful  couch.  And  when  I 
awoke,  the  odour  of  a  bygone  century  was  in  my  nostrils — 
a  faint,  elusive  smell,  of  which  I  never  had  any  conception 
before  crossing  the  Atlantic." 

The  whole  chapter,  entitled  "  Lichfield  and  Uttoxeter," 
is  a  sort  of  graceful  tribute  to  Samuel  Johnson,  who  cer 
tainly  has  nowhere  else  been  more  tenderly  spoken  of. 

"Beyond  all  question  I  might  have  had  a  wiser  friend 
than  he.  The  atmosphere  in  which  alone  he  breathed  was 
dense  :  his  awful  dread  of  death  showed  how  much  muddy 
imperfection  was  to  be  cleansed  out  of  him  before  he  could 
be  capable  of  spiritual  existence ;  he  meddled  only  with  the 
surface  of  life,  and  never  cared  to  penetrate  further  than  to 
ploughshare  depth  ;  his  very  sense  and  sagacity  were  but  a 
one-eyed  clear-sightedness.  I  laughed  at  him,  sometimes 
standing  beside  his  knee.  And  yet,  considering  that  my  na 
tive  propensities  were  towards  Fairy  Land,  and  also  how 
much  yeast  is  generally  mixed  up  with  the  mental  suste 
nance  of  a  New  Englander,  it  may  not  have  been  altogether 
amiss,  in  those  childish  and  boyish  days,  to  keep  pace  with 
this  heavy-footed  traveller,  and  feed  on  the  gross  diet  that 
he  carried  in  his  knapsack.  It  is  wholesome  food  even  now ! 
And  then,  how  English !  Many  of  the  latent  sympathies 


152  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

that  enabled  me  to  enjoy  the  Old  Country  so  well,  and  that 
so  readily  amalgamated  themselves  with  the  American  ideas 
that  seemed  most  adverse  to  them,  may  have  been  derived 
from,  or  fostered  and  kept  alive  by,  the  great  English  moral 
ist.  Never  was  a  descriptive  epithet  more  nicely  appropri 
ate  than  that !  Doctor  Johnson's  morality  was  as  English 
an  article  as  a  beef-steak." 

And  for  mere  beauty  of  expression  I  cannot  forbear 
quoting  this  passage  about  the  days  in  a  fine  English 
summer. 

"For  each  day  seemed  endless,  though  never  wearisome. 
As  far  as  your  actual  experience  is  concerned,  the  English 
summer  day  has  positively  no  beginning  and  no  end.  When 
you  awake,  at  any  reasonable  hour,  the  sun  is  already  shin 
ing  through  the  curtains;  you  live  through  unnumbered 
hours  of  Sabbath  quietude,  with  a  calm  variety  of  incident 
softly  etched  upon  their  tranquil  lapse ;  and  at  length  you 
become  conscious  that  it  is  bedtime  again,  while  there  is 
still  enough  daylight  in  the  sky  to  make  the  pages  of  your 
book  distinctly  legible.  Night,  if  there  be  any  such  season, 
hangs  down  a  transparent  veil  through  which  the  bygone 
day  beholds  its  successor;  or  if  not  quite  true  of  the  latitude 
of  London,  it  may  be  soberly  affirmed  of  the  more  northern 
parts  of  the  island  that  To-morrow  is  born  before  its  Yester 
day  is  dead.  They  exist  together  in  the  golden  twilight, 
where  the  decrepit  old  day  dimly  discerns  the  face  of  the 
ominous  infant ;  and  you,  though  a  mere  mortal,  may  simul 
taneously  touch  them  both,  with  one  finger  of  recollection 
and  another  of  prophecy." 

The  Note-Books,  as  I  have  said,  deal  chiefly  with  the 
superficial  aspect  of  English  life,  and  describe  the  material 
objects  with  which  the  author  was  surrounded.  They 
often  describe  them  admirably,  and  the  rural  beauty  of 
the  country  has  never  been  more  happily  expressed.  But 


TL]  ENGLAND  AND  ITALY.  153 

there  are  inevitably  a  great  many  reflections  and  inci 
dental  judgments,  characterisations  of  people  he  met,  frag 
ments  of  psychology  and  social  criticism,  and  it  is  here 
that  Hawthorne's  mixture  of  subtlety  and  simplicity,  his 
interfusion  of  genius  with  what  I  have  ventured  to  call 
the  provincial  quality,  is  most  apparent.  To  an  American 
reader  this  latter  quality,  which  is  never  grossly  manifest 
ed,  but  pervades  the  Journals  like  a  vague  natural  per 
fume,  an  odour  of  purity  and  kindness  and  integrity,  must 
always,  for  a  reason  that  I  will  touch  upon,  have  a  consid 
erable  charm ;  and  such  a  reader  will  accordingly  take  an 
even  greater  satisfaction  in  the  Diaries  kept  during  the 
two  years  Hawthorne  spent  in  Italy ;  for  in  these  volumes 
the  element  I  speak  of  is  especially  striking.  He  resigned 
his  consulate  at  Liverpool  towards  the  close  of  1857 — 
whether  because  he  was  weary  of  his  manner  of  life  there 
and  of  the  place  itself,  as  may  well  have  been,  or  because 
he  wished  to  anticipate  supersession  by  the  new  govern 
ment  (Mr.  Buchanan's)  which  was  just  establishing  itself 
at  Washington,  is  not  apparent  from  the  slender  sources 
of  information  from  which  these  pages  have  been  com 
piled.  In  the  month  of  January  of  the  following  year  he 
betook  himself,  with  his  family,  to  the  Continent,  and,  as 
promptly  as  possible,  made  the  best  of  his  way  to  Rome. 
He  spent  the  remainder  of  the  winter  and  the  spring 
there,  and  then  went  to  Florence  for  the  summer  and  au 
tumn  ;  after  which  he  returned  to  Rome  and  passed  a 
second  season.  His  Italian  Note-Books  are  very  pleasant 
reading,  but  they  are  of  less  interest  than  the  others; 
for  his  contact  with  the  life  of  the  country,  its  people  and 
its  manners,  was  simply  that  of  the  ordinary  tourist — 
which  amounts  to  saying  that  it  was  extremely  superficial. 
He  appears  to  have  suffered  a  great  deal  of  discomfort 


154  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

and  depression  in  Rome,  and  not  to  have  been,  on  the 
whole,  in  the  best  mood  for  enjoying  the  place  and  its  re 
sources.  That  he  did,  at  one  time  and  another,  enjoy 
these  things  keenly  is  proved  by  his  beautiful  romance, 
Transformation,  which  could  never  have  been  written  by 
a  man  who  had  not  had  many  hours  of  exquisite  apprecia 
tion  of  the  lovely  land  of  Italy.  But  he  took  it  hard,  as 
it  were,  and  suffered  himself  to  be  painfully  discomposed 
by  the  usual  accidents  of  Italian  life,  as  foreigners  learn  to 
know  it.  His  future  was  again  uncertain,  and  during  his 
second  winter  in  Rome  he  was  in  danger  of  losing  his 
elder  daughter  by  a  malady  which  he  speaks  of  as  a  trou 
ble  "  that  pierced  to  my  very  vitals."  I  may  mention, 
with  regard  to  this  painful  episode,  that  Franklin  Pierce, 
whose  presidential  days  were  over,  and  who,  like  other  ex- 
presidents,  was  travelling  in  Europe,  came  to  Rome  at  the 
time,  and  that  the  Note -Books  contain  some  singularly 
beautiful  and  touching  allusions  to  his  old  friend's  grati 
tude  for  his  sympathy,  and  enjoyment  of  his  society. 
The  sentiment  of  friendship  has,  on  the  whole,  been  so 
much  less  commemorated  in  literature  than  might  have 
been  expected  from  the  place  it  is  supposed  to  hold  in 
life,  that  there  is  always  something  striking  in  any  frank 
and  ardent  expression  of  it.  It  occupied,  in  so  far  as 
Pierce  was  the  object  of  it,  a  large  place  in  Hawthorne's 
mind,  and  it  is  impossible  not  to  feel  the  manly  tender 
ness  of  such  lines  as  these : — 

"  I  have  found  him  here  in  Rome,  the  whole  of  my  early 
friend,  and  even  better  than  I  used  to  know  him ;  a  heart  as 
true  and  affectionate,  a  mind  much  widened  and  deepened 
by  the  experience  of  life.  We  hold  just  the  same  relation  to 
one  another  as  of  yore,  and  we  have  passed  all  the  turning- 
olf  places,  and  may  hope  to  go  on  together,  still  the  same 


vi.]  ENGLAND  AND  ITALY.  155 

clear  friends,  as  long  as  we  live.  I  do  not  love  him  one  whit 
the  less  for  having  been  President,  nor  for  having  done  me 
the  greatest  good  in  his  power;  a  fact  that  speaks  eloquent 
ly  in  his  favour,  and  perhaps  says  a  little  for  myself.  If 
he  had  been  merely  a  benefactor,  perhaps  I  might  not  have 
borne  it  so  well ;  but  each  did  his  best  for  the  other,  as 
friend  for  fiiend." 

The  Note-Books  are  chiefly  taken  up  with  descriptions 
of  the  regular  sights  and  "  objects  of  interest,"  which  we 
often  feel  to  be  rather  perfunctory,  and  a  little  in  the  style 
of  the  traditional  tourists'  diary.  They  abound  in  charm 
ing  touches,  and  every  reader  of  Transformation  will  re 
member  the  delightful  colouring  of  the  numerous  pages 
in  that  novel,  which  are  devoted  to  the  pictorial  aspects  of 
Rome.  But  we  are  unable  to  rid  ourselves  of  the  impres 
sion  that  Hawthorne  was  a  good  deal  bored  by  the  im 
portunity  of  Italian  art,  for  which  his  taste,  naturally  not 
keen,  had  never  been  cultivated.  Occasionally,  indeed,  he 
breaks  out  into  explicit  sighs  and  groans,  and  frankly  de 
clares  that  he  washes  his  hands  of  it.  Already,  in  Eng 
land,  he  had  made  the  discovery  that  he  could  easily  feel 
overdosed  with  such  things.  "Yesterday,"  he  wrote  in 
1856,  "  I  went  out  at  about  twelve  and  visited  the  British 
Museum ;  an  exceedingly  tiresome  affair.  It  quite  crush 
es  a  person  to  see  so  much  at  once,  and  I  wandered  from 
hall  to  hall  with  a  weary  and  heavy  heart,  wishing  (Heav 
en  forgive  me !)  that  the  Elgin  marbles  and  the  frieze  of 
the  Parthenon  were  all  burnt  into  lime,  and  that  the  gran 
ite  Egyptian  statues  were  hewn  and  squared  into  building- 
stones." 

The  plastic  sense  was  not  strong  in  Hawthorne ;  there 
can  be  no  better  proof  of  it  than  his  curious  aversion  to 
the  representation  of  the  nude  in  sculpture.  This  aversion 


156  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

was  deep-seated ;  he  constantly  returns  to  it,  exclaiming 
upon  the  incongruity  of  modern  artists  making  naked  fig 
ures.  He  apparently  quite  failed  to  see  that  nudity  is  not 
an  incident,  or  accident,  of  sculpture,  but  its  very  essence 
and  principle ;  and  his  jealousy  of  undressed  images  strikes 
the  reader  as  a  strange,  vague,  long  -  dormant  heritage  of 
his  straight  -  laced  Puritan  ancestry.  Whenever  he  talks 
of  statues  he  makes  a  great  point  of  the  smoothness  and 
whiteness  of  the  marble — speaks  of  the  surface  of  the  mar 
ble  as  if  it  were  half  the  beauty  of  the  image ;  and  when 
he  discourses  of  pictures,  one  feels  that  the  brightness  or 
dinginess  of  the  frame  is  an  essential  part  of  his  impres 
sion  of  the  work — as  he,  indeed,  somewhere  distinctly  af 
firms.  Like  a  good  American,  he  took  more  pleasure  in 
the  productions  of  Mr.  Thompson  and  Mr.  Brown,  Mr. 
Powers  and  Mr.  Hart,  American  artists  who  were  plying 
their  trade  in  Italy,  than  in  the  works  which  adorned  the 
ancient  museums  of  the  country.  He  suffered  greatly 
from  the  cold,  and  found  little  charm  in  the  climate,  and 
during  the  weeks  of  winter  that  followed  his  arrival  in 
Rome  he  sat  shivering  by  his  fire,  and  wondering  why  he 
had  come  to  such  a  land  of  misery.  Before  he  left  Italy, 
he  wrote  to  his  publisher — "  I  bitterly  detest  Rome,  and 
shall  rejoice  to  bid  it  farewell  forever;  and  I  fully  acqui 
esce  in  all  the  mischief  and  ruin  that  has  happened  to  it, 
from  Nero's  conflagration  downward.  In  fact,  I  wish  the 
very  site  had  been  obliterated  before  I  ever  saw  it."  Haw 
thorne  presents  himself  to  the  reader  of  these  pages  as  the 
last  of  the  old-fashioned  Americans — and  this  is  the  interest 
which  I  just  now  said  that  his  compatriots  would  find  in 
his  very  limitations.  I  do  not  mean  by  this  that  there  are 
not  still  many  of  his  fellow-countrymen  (as  there  are  many 
natives  of  every  land  under  the  sun)  who  are  more  suscep- 


vi.J  ENGLAND  AND  ITALY.  157 

tible  of  being  irritated  than  of  being  soothed  by  the  influ 
ences  of  the  Eternal  City.  What  I  mean  is  that  an  Amer 
ican  of  equal  value  with  Hawthorne,  an  American  of  equal 
genius,  imagination,  and,  as  our  forefathers  said,  sensibility, 
would  at  present  inevitably  accommodate  himself  more  ea 
sily  to  the  idiosyncrasies  of  foreign  lands.  An  American 
as  cultivated  as  Hawthorne,  is  now  almost  inevitably  more 
cultivated,  and,  as  a  matter  of  course,  more  Europeanised 
in  advance,  more  cosmopolitan.  It  is  very  possible  that  in 
becoming  so  he  has  lost  something  of  his  occidental  savour, 
the  quality  which  excites  the  good-will  of  the  American 
reader  of  our  author's  Journals  for  the  dislocated,  depress 
ed,  even  slightly-bewildered  diarist.  Absolutely  the  last 
of  the  earlier  race  of  Americans  Hawthorne  was,  fortunate 
ly,  probably  far  from  being.  But  I  think  of  him  as  the 
last  specimen  of  the  more  primitive  type  of  man  of  let 
ters  ;  and  when  it  comes  to  measuring  what  he  succeeded 
in  being,  in  his  unadulterated  form,  against  what  he  failed 
of  being,  the  positive  side  of  the  image  quite  extinguishes 
the  negative.  I  must  be  on  my  guard,  however,  against 
incurring  the  charge  of  cherishing  a  national  conscious 
ness  as  acute  as  I  have  ventured  to  pronounce  his  own. 

Out  of  his  mingled  sensations,  his  pleasure  and  his  wea 
riness,  his  discomforts  and  his  reveries,  there  sprang  anoth 
er  beautiful  work.  During  the  summer  of  1858,  he  hired 
a  picturesque  old  villa  on  the  hill  of  Bellosguardo,  near 
Florence,  a  curious  structure  with  a  crenelated  tower, 
which,  after  having  in  the  course  of  its  career  suffered 
many  vicissitudes  and  played  many  parts,  now  finds  its 
most  vivid  identity  in  being  pointed  out  to  strangers  as 
the  sometime  residence  of  the  celebrated  American  ro 
mancer.  Hawthorne  took  a  fancy  to  the  place,  as  well  he 
might,  for  it  is  one  of  the  loveliest  spots  on  earth,  and  the 


158  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

great  view  that  stretched  itself  before  him  contains  every 
element  of  beauty.  Florence  lay  at  his  feet,  with  her  mem 
ories  and  treasures ;  the  olive-coloured  hills  bloomed  around 
him,  studded  with  villas  as  picturesque  as  his  own ;  the 
Apennines,  perfect  in  form  and  colour,  disposed  themselves 
opposite ;  and  in  the  distance,  along  its  fertile  valley,  the 
Arno  wandered  to  Pisa  and  the  sea.  Soon  after  coming 
hither  he  wrote  to  a  friend  in  a  strain  of  high  satisfaction. 

"  It  is  pleasant  to  feel  at  last  that  I  am  really  away  from 
America — a  satisfaction  that  I  never  really  enjoyed  as  long 
as  I  stayed  in  Liverpool,  where  it  seemed  to  be  that  the  quin 
tessence  of  nasal  and  hand-shaking  Yankeedom  was  gradual 
ly  filtered  and  sublimated  through  my  consulate,  on  the  way 
outward  and  homeward.  I  first  got  acquainted  with  my  own 
countrymen  there.  At  Rome,  too,  it  was  not  much  better. 
But  here  in  Florence,  and  in  the  summer-time,  and  in  this  se 
cluded  villa,  I  have  escaped  out  of  all  my  old  tracks,  and  am 
really  remote.  I  like  my  present  residence  immensely.  The 
house  stands  on  a  hill,  overlooking  Florence,  and  is  big 
enough  to  quarter  a  regiment,  insomuch  that  each  member 
of  the  family,  including  servants,  has  a  separate  suite  of 
apartments,  and  there  are  vast  wildernesses  of  upper  rooms 
into  which  we  have  never  yet  sent  exploring  expeditions. 
At  one  end  of  the  house  there  is  a  moss-grown  tower,  haunt 
ed  by  owls  and  by  the  ghost  of  a  monk  who  was  confined 
there  in  the  thirteenth  century,  previous  to  being  burnt  at 
the  stake  in  the  principal  square  of  Florence.  I  hire  this 
villa,  tower  and  all,  at  twenty-eight  dollars  a  month  ;  but  I 
mean  to  take  it  away  bodily  and  clap  it  into  a  romance,  which 
I  have  in  my  head,  ready  to  be  written  out." 

This  romance  was  Transformation,  which  he  wrote  out 
during  the  following  winter  in  Rome,  and  re-wrote  during 
the  several  months  that  he  spent  in  England,  chiefly  at 
Leamington,  before  returning  to  America.  The  Villa  Mon- 


vi.]  ENGLAND  AND  ITALY.  159 

tauto  figures,  in  fact,  in  this  tale  as  the  castle  of  Monte- 
Beni,  the  patrimonial  dwelling  of  the  hero.  "  I  take  some 
credit  to  myself,"  he  wrote  to  the  same  friend,  on  return 
ing  to  Rome,  "  for  having  sternly  shut  myself  up  for  an 
hour  or  two  every  day,  and  come  to  close  grips  with  a 
romance  which  I  have  been  trying  to  tear  out  of  my 
mind."  And  later  in  the  same  winter  he  says — "  I  shall 
go  home,  I  fear,  with  a  heavy  heart,  not  expecting  to  be 
very  well  contented  there.  ...  If  I  were  but  a  hundred 
times  richer  than  I  am,  how  very  comfortable  I  could  be  ! 
I  consider  it  a  great  piece  of  good  fortune  that  I  have  had 
experience  of  the  discomforts  and  miseries  of  Italy,  and 
did  not  go  directly  home  from  England.  Anything  will 
seem  like  a  Paradise  after  a  Roman  winter."  But  he  got 
away  at  last,  late  in  the  spring,  carrying  his  novel  with 
him,  and  the  book  was  published,  after,  as  I  say,  he  had 
worked  it  over,  mainly  during  some  weeks  that  he  passed 
at  the  little  watering-place  of  Redcar,  on  the  Yorkshire 
coast,  in  February  of  the  following  year.  It  was  issued 
primarily  in  England ;  the  American  edition  immediately 
followed.  It  is  an  odd  fact  that  in  the  two  countries  the 
book  came  out  under  different  titles.  The  title  that  the 
author  had  bestowed  upon  it  did  not  satisfy  the  English 
publishers,  who  requested  him  to  provide  it  with  another; 
so  that  it  is  only  in  America  that  the  work  bears  the  name 
of  The  Marble  Faun.  Hawthorne's  choice  of  this  ap 
pellation  is,  by  the  way,  rather  singular,  for  it  completely 
fails  to  characterise  the  story,  the  subject  of  which  is  the 
living  faun,  the  faun  of  flesh  and  blood,  the  unfortunate 
Donatello.  His  marble  counterpart  is  mentioned  only  in 
the  opening  chapter.  On  the  other  hand,  Hawthorne  com 
plained  that  Transformation  "  gives  one  the  idea  of  Har 
lequin  in  a  pantomime."  Under  either  name,  however,  the 


160  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

book  was  a  great  success,  and  it  has  probably  become  the 
most  popular  of  Hawthorne's  four  novels.  It  is  part  of 
the  intellectual  equipment  of  the  Anglo-Saxon  visitor  to 
Rome,  and  is  read  by  every  English-speaking  traveller  who 
arrives  there,  who  has  been  there,  or  who  expects  to  go. 

It  has  a  great  deal  of  beauty,  of  interest  and  grace ;  but 
it  has,  to  my  sense,  a  slighter  value  than  its  companions, 
and  I  am  far  from  regarding  it  as  the  masterpiece  of  the 
author,  a  position  to  which  we  sometimes  hear  it  assigned. 
The  subject  is  admirable,  and  so  are  many  of  the  details ; 
but  the  whole  thing  is  less  simple  and  complete  than  either 
of  the  three  tales  of  American  life,  and  Hawthorne  for 
feited  a  precious  advantage  in  ceasing  to  tread  his  native 
soil.  Half  the  virtue  of  The  Scarlet  Letter  and  The  House 
of  the  Seven  Gables  is  in  their  local  quality ;  they  are  im 
pregnated  with  the  New  England  air.  It  is  very  true  that 
Hawthorne  had  no  pretension  to  portray  actualities,  and 
to  cultivate  that  literal  exactitude  which  is  now  the  fashion. 
Had  this  been  the  case,  he  would  probably  have  made  a 
still  graver  mistake  in  transporting  the  scene  of  his  story 
to  a  country  which  he  knew  only  superficially.  His  tales 
all  go  on  more  or  less  "  in  the  vague,"  as  the  French  say, 
and  of  course  the  vague  may  as  well  be  placed  in  Tuscany 
as  in  Massachusetts.  It  may  also  very  well  be  urged  in 
Hawthorne's  favour  here,  that  in  Transformation  he  has 
attempted  to  deal  with  actualities  more  than  he  did  in 
either  of  his  earlier  novels.  He  has  described  the  streets 
and  monuments  of  Rome  with  a  closeness  which  forms  no 
part  of  his  reference  to  those  of  Boston  and  Salem.  But 
for  all  this  he  incurs  that  penalty  of  seeming  factitious  and 
unauthoritative,  which  is  always  the  result  of  an  artist's  at 
tempt  to  project  himself  into  an  atmosphere  in  which  he 
has  not  a  transmitted  and  inherited  property.  An  English 


vi.]  ENGLAND  AND  ITALY.  161 

or  a  German  writer  (I  put  poets  aside)  may  love  Italy  well 
enough,  and  know  her  well  enough,  to  write  delightful  fic 
tions  about  her ;  the  thing  has  often  been  done.  But  the 
productions  in  question  will,  as  novels,  always  have  about 
them  something  second-rate  and  imperfect.  There  is  in 
Transformation  enough  beautiful  perception  of  the  inter 
esting  character  of  Rome,  enough  rich  and  eloquent  ex 
pression  of  it,  to  save  the  book,  if  the  book  could  be  saved ; 
but  the  style,  what  the  French  call  the  genre,  is  an  inferior 
one,  and  the  thing  remains  a  charming  romance  with  in 
trinsic  weaknesses. 

Allowing  for  this,  however,  some  of  the  finest  pages  in 
all  Hawthorne  are  -to  be  found  in  it.  The  subject,  as  I 
have  said,  is  a  particularly  happy  one,  and  there  is  a  great 
deal  of  interest  in  the  simple  combination  and  opposition 
of  the  four  actors.  It  is  noticeable  that,  in  spite  of  the 
considerable  length  of  the  story,  there  are  no  accessory  fig 
ures;  Donatello  and  Miriam,  Kenyon  and  Hilda  exclusively 
occupy  the  scene.  This  is  the  more  noticeable  as  the  scene 
is  very  large,  and  the  great  Roman  background  is  constant 
ly  presented  to  us.  The  relations  of  these  four  people  are 
full  of  that  moral  picturesqueness  which  Hawthorne  was 
always  looking  for;  he  found  it  in  perfection  in  the  his 
tory  of  Donatello.  As  I  have  said,  the  novel  is  the  most 
popular  of  his  works,  and  every  one  will  remember  the  fig 
ure  of  the  simple,  joyous,  sensuous  young  Italian,  who  is 
not  so  much  a  man  as  a  child,  and  not  so  much  a  child  as 
a  charming,  innocent  animal,  and  how  he  is  brought  to  self- 
knowledge,  and  to  a  miserable  conscious  manhood,  by  the 
commission  of  a  crime.  Donatello  is  rather  vague  and  im 
palpable  ;  he  says  too  little  in  the  book,  shows  himself  too 
little,  and  falls  short,  I  think,  of  being  a  creation.  But  he 
is  enough  of  a  creation  to  make  us  enter  into  the  sitna- 
8 


162  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

tion,  and  the  whole  history  of  his  rise,  or  fall,  whichever 
one  chooses  to  call  it — his  tasting  of  the  tree  of  knowl 
edge,  and  finding  existence  complicated  with  a  regret — is 
unfolded  with  a  thousand  ingenious  and  exquisite  touches. 
Of  course,  to  make  the  interest  complete,  there  is  a  woman 
in  the  affair;  and  Hawthorne  has  done  few  things  more 
beautiful  than  the  picture  of  the  unequal  complicity  of 
guilt  between  his  immature  and  dimly-puzzled  hero,  with 
his  clinging,  unquestioning,  unexacting  devotion,  and  the 
dark,  powerful,  more  widely  -  seeing  feminine  nature  of 
Miriam.  Deeply  touching  is  the  representation  of  the 
manner  in  which  these  two  essentially  different  persons — 
the  woman  intelligent,  passionate,  acquainted  with  life, 
and  with  a  tragic  element  in  her  own  career;  the  youth 
ignorant,  gentle,  unworldly,  brightly  and  harmlessly  natu 
ral — are  equalised  and  bound  together  by  their  common 
secret,  which  insulates  them,  morally,  from  the  rest  of 
mankind.  The  character  of  Hilda  has  always  struck  me 
as  an  admirable  invention — one  of  those  things  that  mark 
the  man  of  genius.  It  needed  a  man  of  genius  and  of 
Hawthorne's  imaginative  delicacy,  to  feel  the  propriety  of 
such  a  figure  as  Hilda's,  and  to  perceive  the  relief  it  would 
both  give  and  borrow.  This  pure  and  somewhat  rigid 
New  England  girl,  following  the  vocation  of  a  copyist  of 
pictures  in  Rome,  unacquainted  with  evil  and  untouched 
by  impurity,  has  been  accidentally  the  witness,  unknown 
and  unsuspected,  of  the  dark  deed  by  which  her  friends, 
Miriam  and  Donatello,  are  knit  together.  This  is  her  rev 
elation  of  evil,  her  loss  of  perfect  innocence.  She  has 
done  no  wrong,  and  yet  wrong-doing  has  become  a  part  of 
her  experience,  and  she  carries  the  weight  of  her  detested 
knowledge  upon  her  heart.  She  carries  it  a  long  time, 
saddened  and  oppressed  by  it,  till  at  last  she  can  bear  it 


vi.]  ENGLAND  AND  ITALY.  163 

no  longer.  If  I  have  called  the  whole  idea  of  the  pres 
ence  and  effect  of  Hilda  in  the  story  a  trait  of  genius,  the 
purest  touch  of  inspiration  is  the  episode  in  which  the 
poor  girl  deposits  her  burden.  She  has  passed  the  whole 
lonely  summer  in  Rome ;  and  one  day,  at  the  end  of  it, 
finding  herself  in  St.  Peter's,  she  enters  a  confessional, 
strenuous  daughter  of  the  Puritans  as  she  is,  and  pours 
out  her  dark  knowledge  into  the  bosom  of  the  church — 
then  comes  away  with  her  conscience  lightened,  not  a 
whit  the  less  a  Puritan  than  before.  If  the  book  con 
tained  nothing  else  noteworthy  but  this  admirable  scene, 
and  the  pages  describing  the  murder  committed  by  Dona- 
tello  under  Miriam's  eyes,  and  the  ecstatic  wandering,  af 
terwards,  of  the  guilty  couple  through  the  "  blood-stained 
streets  of  Rome,"  it  would  still  deserve  to  rank  high 
among  the  imaginative  productions  of  our  day. 

Like  all  of  Hawthorne's  things,  it  contains  a  great  many 
light  threads  of  symbolism,  which  shimmer  in  the  texture 
of  the  tale,  but  which  are  apt  to  break  and  remain  in  our 
fingers  if  we  attempt  to  handle  them.  These  things  are 
part  of  Hawthorne's  very  manner — almost,  as  one  might 
say,  of  his  vocabulary ;  they  belong  much  more  to  the  sur 
face  of  his  work  than  to  its  stronger  interest.  The  fault 
of  Transformation  is  that  the  element  of  the  unreal  is 
pushed  too  far,  and  that  the  book  is  neither  positively  of 
one  category  nor  of  another.  His  "  moonshiny  romance," 
he  calls  it  in  a  letter ;  and,  in  truth,  the  lunar  element  is 
a  little  too  pervasive.  The  action  wavers  between  the 
streets  of  Rome,  whose  literal  features  the  author  perpetu 
ally  sketches,  and  a  vague  realm  of  fancy,  in  which  quite  a 
different  verisimilitude  prevails.  This  is  the  trouble  with 
Donatello  himself.  His  companions  are  intended  to  be 
real — if  they  fail  to  be  so,  it  is  not  for  want  of  intention ; 


164  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP.  vi. 

whereas  he  is  intended  to  be  real  or  not,  as  you  please. 
He  is  of  a  different  substance  from  them ;  it  is  as  if  a 
painter,  in  composing  a  picture,  should  try  to  give  you  an 
impression  of  one  of  his  figures  by  a  strain  of  music.  The 
idea  of  the  modern  faun  was  a  charming  one;  but  I  think 
it  a  pity  that  the  author  should  not  have  made  him  more 
definitely  modern,  without  reverting  so  much  to  his  myth 
ological  properties  and  antecedents,  which  are  very  grace 
fully  touched  upon,  but  which  belong  to  the  region  of  pict 
uresque  conceits,  much  more  than  to  that  of  real  psychol 
ogy.  Among  the  young  Italians  of  to-day  there  are  still 
plenty  of  models  for  such  an  image  as  Hawthorne  appears 
to  have  wished  to  present  in  the  easy  and  natural  Donatel- 
lo.  And  since  I  am  speaking  critically,  I  may  go  on  to  say 
that  the  art  of  narration,  in  Transformation,  seems  to  me 
more  at  fault  than  in  the  author's  other  novels.  The  story 
straggles  and  wanders,  is  dropped  and  taken  up  again,  and 
towards  the  close  lapses  into  an  almost  fatal  vagueness. 


CHAPTER  VII. 

LAST  YEARS. 

OF  the  four  last  years  of  Hawthorne's  life  there  is  not 
much  to  tell  that  I  have  not  already  told.  He  returned 
to  America  in  the  summer  of  1860,  and  took  up  his  abode 
in  the  house  he  had  bought  at  Concord  before  going  to 
Europe,  and  of  which  his  occupancy  had  as  yet  been  brief. 
He  was  to  occupy  it  only  four  years.  I  have  insisted  upon 
the  fact  of  his  being  an  intense  American,  and  of  his  look 
ing  at  all  things,  during  his  residence  in  Europe,  from  the 
standpoint  of  that  little  clod  of  Western  earth  which  he 
carried  about  with  him  as  the  good  Mohammedan  carries 
the  strip  of  carpet  on  which  he  kneels  down  to  face  to 
wards  Mecca.  But  it  does  not  appear,  nevertheless,  that 
he  found  himself  treading  with  any  great  exhilaration  the 
larger  section  of  his  native  soil  upon  which,  on  his  return, 
he  disembarked.  Indeed,  the  closing  part  of  his  life  was  a 
period  of  dejection,  the  more  acute  that  it  followed  direct 
ly  upon  seven  years  of  the  happiest  opportunities  he  was 
to  have  known.  And  his  European  residence  had  been 
brightest  at  the  last;  he  had  broken  almost  completely 
with  those  habits  of  extreme  seclusion  into  which  he  was 
to  relapse  on  his  return  to  Concord.  "You  would  be 
stricken  dumb,"  he  writes  from  London,  shortly  before 


166  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

leaving  it  for  the  last  time,  "  to  see  how  quietly  I  accept 
a  whole  string  of  invitations,  and,  what  is  more,  perform 
my  engagements  without  a  murmur.  .  .  .  The  stir  of  this 
London  life,  somehow  or  other,"  he  adds  in  the  same 
letter, "  has  done  rne  a  wonderful  deal  of  good,  and  I  feel 
better  than  for  months  past.  This  is  strange,  for  if  I  had 
my  choice  I  should  leave  undone  almost  all  the  things  I 
do."  "  When  he  found  himself  once  more  on  the  old 
ground,"  writes  Mr.  Lathrop,  "  with  the  old  struggle  for 
subsistence  staring  him  in  the  face  again,  it  is  not  difficult 
to  conceive  how  a  certain  degree  of  depression  would  fol 
low."  There  is,  indeed,  not  a  little  sadness  in  the  thought 
of  Hawthorne's  literary  gift — light,  delicate,  exquisite,  ca 
pricious,  never  too  abundant,  being  charged  with  the  heavy 
burden  of  the  maintenance  of  a  family.  We  feel  that  it 
was  not  intended  for  such  grossness,  and  that  in  a  world 
ideally  constituted  he  would  have  enjoyed  a  liberal  pen 
sion,  an  assured  subsistence,  and  have  been  able  to  produce 
his  charming  prose  only  when  the  fancy  took  him. 

The  brightness  of  the  outlook  at  home  was  not  made 
greater  by  the  explosion  of  the  Civil  War  in  the  spring 
of  1861.  These  months,  and  the  three  years  that  follow 
ed  them,  were  not  a  cheerful  time  for  any  persons  but 
army-contractors;  but  over  Hawthorne  the  war-cloud  ap 
pears  to  have  dropped  a  permanent  shadow.  The  whole 
affair  was  a  bitter  disappointment  to  him,  and  a  fatal  blow 
to  that  happy  faith  in  the  uninterruptedness  of  American 
prosperity  which  I  have  spoken  of  as  the  religion  of  the 
old-fashioned  American  in  -general,  and  the  old-fashioned 
Democrat  in  particular.  It  was  not  a  propitious  time  for 
cultivating  the  Muse;  when  history  herself  is  so  hard  at 
work,  fiction  has  little  left  to  say.  To  fiction,  directly, 
Hawthorne  did  not  address  himself;  he  composed  first, 


VIL]  LAST  YEARS.  167 

chiefly  during  the  year  1862,  the  chapters  of  which  our 
Our  Old  Home  was  afterwards  made  up.  I  have  said 
that,  though  this  work  has  less  value  than  his  purely  imag 
inative  things,  the  writing  is  singularly  good,  and  it  is  well 
to  remember,  to  its  greater  honour,  that  it  was  produced 
at  a  time  when  it  was  painfully  hard  for  a  man  of  Haw 
thorne's  cast  of  mind  to  fix  his  attention.  The  air  was 
full  of  battle-smoke,  and  the  poet's  vision  was  not  easily 
clear.  Hawthorne  was  irritated,  too,  by  the  sense  of  being 
to  a  certain  extent,  politically  considered,  in  a  false  posi 
tion.  A  large  section  of  the  Democratic  party  was  not  in 
good  odour  at  the  North;  its  loyalty  was  not  perceived 
to  be  of  that  clear  strain  which  public  opinion  required. 
To  this  wing  of  the  party  Franklin  Pierce  had,  with  rea 
son  or  without,  the  credit  of  belonging ;  and  our  author 
was  conscious  of  some  sharpness  of  responsibility  in  de 
fending  the  illustrious  friend  of  whom  he  had  already 
made  himself  the  advocate.  He  defended  him  manfully, 
without  a  grain  of  concession,  and  described  the  ex-Presi 
dent  to  the  public  (and  to  himself),  if  not  as  he  was,  then 
as  he  ought  to  be.  Our  Old  Home  is  dedicated  to  him, 
and  about  this  dedication  there  was  some  little  difficulty. 
It  was  represented  to  Hawthorne  that  as  General  Pierce 
was  rather  out  of  fashion,  it  might  injure  the  success,  and, 
in  plain  terms,  the  sale  of  his  book.  His  answer  (to  his 
publisher)  was  much  to  the  point. 

"  I  find  that  it  would  be  a  piece  of  poltroonery  in  rne  to 
withdraw  either  the  dedication  or  the  dedicatory  letter.  My 
long  and  intimate  personal  relations  with  Pierce  render  the 
dedication  altogether  proper,  especially  as  regards  this  book, 
which  would  have  had  no  existence  without  his  kindness ; 
and  if  he  is  so  exceedingly  unpopular  that  his  name  ought  to 
sink  the  volume,  there  is  so  much  the  more  need  that  an  old 


168  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

friend  should  stand  by  him.  I  cannot,  merely  on  account  of 
pecuniary  profit  on  literary  reputation,  go  back  from  what  I 
have  deliberately  felt  and  thought  it  right  to  do ;  and  if  I 
were  to  tear  out  the  dedication  I  should  never  look  at  the  vol 
ume  again  without  remorse  and  shame.  As  for  the  literary 
public,  it  must  accept  my  book  precisely  as  I  think  fit  to  give 
it,  or  let  it  alone.  Nevertheless,  I  have  no  fancy  for  making 
myself  a  martyr  when  it  is  honourably  and  conscientiously 
possible  to  avoid  it ;  and  I  always  measure  out  heroism  very 
accurately  according  to  the  exigencies  of  the  occasion,  and 
should  be  the  last  man  in  the  world  to  throw  away  a  bit  of 
it  needlessly.  So  I  have  looked  over  the  concluding  para 
graph,  and  have  amended  it  in  such  a  way  that,  while  doing 
what  I  know  to  be  justice  to  my  friend,  it  contains  not  a 
word  that  ought  to  be  objectionable  to  any  set  of  readers. 
If  the  public  of  the  North  see  fit  to  ostracise  me  for  this,  I 
can  only  say  that  I  would  gladly  sacrifice  a  thousand  or  two 
dollars,  rather  than  retain  the  good-will  of  such  a  herd  of 
dolts  and  mean-spirited  scoundrels." 

The  dedication  was  published,  the  book  was  eminently 
successful,  and  Hawthorne  was  not  ostracised.  The  para 
graph  under  discussion  stands  as  follows :  "  Only  this  let 
me  say,  that,  with  the  record  of  your  life  in  my  memory, 
and  with  a  sense  of  your  character  in  my  deeper  conscious 
ness,  as  among  the  few  things  that  time  has  left  as  it  found 
them,  I  need  no  assurance  that  you  continue  faithful  for 
ever  to  that  grand  idea  of  an  irrevocable  Union  which,  as 
you  once  told  me,  was  the  earliest  that  your  brave  father 
taught  you.  For  other  men  there  may  be  a  choice  of 
paths — for  you  but  one ;  and  it  rests  among  my  certainties 
that  no  man's  loyalty  is  more  steadfast,  no  man's  hopes 
or  apprehensions  on  behalf  of  our  national  existence  more 
deeply  heartfelt,  or  more  closely  intertwined  with  his  pos 
sibilities  of  personal  happiness,  than  those  of  Franklin 


TIL]  LAST  YEARS.  169 

Pierce."  I  know  not  how  well  the  ex -President  liked 
these  lines,  but  the  public  thought  them  admirable,  for 
they  served  as  a  kind  of  formal  profession  of  faith,  on  the 
question  of  the  hour,  by  a  loved  and  honoured  writer. 
That  some  of  his  friends  thought  such  a  profession  needed 
is  apparent  from  the  numerous  editorial  ejaculations  and 
protests  appended  to  an  article  describing  a  visit  he  had 
just  paid  to  Washington,  which  Hawthorne  contributed  to 
the  Altantic  Monthly  for  July,  1862,  and  which,  singular 
ly  enough,  has  not  been  reprinted.  The  article  has  all  the 
usual  merit  of  such  sketches  on  Hawthorne's  part — the 
merit  of  delicate,  sportive  feeling,  expressed  with  consum 
mate  grace — but  the  editor  of  the  periodical  appears  to 
have  thought  that  he  must  give  the  antidote  with  the 
poison,  and  the  paper  is  accompanied  with  several  little 
notes  disclaiming  all  sympathy  with  the  writer's  political 
heresies.  The  heresies  strike  the  reader  of  to-day  as  ex 
tremely  mild,  and  what  excites  his  emotion,  rather,  is  the 
questionable  taste  of  the  editorial  commentary,  with  which 
it  is  strange  that  Hawthorne  should  have  allowed  his  arti 
cle  to  be  encumbered.  He  had  not  been  an  Abolitionist 
before  the  War,  and  that  he  should  not  pretend  to  be  one 
at  the  eleventh  hour,  was,  for  instance,  surely  a  piece  of 
consistency  that  might  have  been  allowed  to  pass.  "I 
shall  not  pretend  to  be  an  admirer  of  old  John  Brown," 
he  says,  in  a  page  worth  quoting,  "  any  further  than  sym 
pathy  with  Whittier's  excellent  ballad  about  him  may  go ; 
nor  did  I  expect  ever  to  shrink  so  unutterably  from  any 
apophthegm  of  a  sage  whose  happy  lips  have  uttered  a 
hundred  golden  sentences  " — the  allusion  here,  I  suppose, 
is  to  Mr.  Emerson — "  as  from  that  saying  (perhaps  falsely 
attributed  to  so  honoured  a  name),  that  the  death  of  this 
blood-stained  fanatic  has  '  made  the  Gallows  as  venerable 
8* 


170  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP, 

as  the  Cross!'  Nobody  was  ever  more  justly  hanged. 
He  won  his  martyrdom  fairly,  and  took  it  fairly.  He 
himself,  I  am  persuaded  (such  was  his  natural  integrity), 
would  have  acknowledged  that  Virginia  had  a  right  to 
take  the  life  which  he  had  staked  and  lost ;  although  it 
would  have  been  better  for  her,  in  the  hour  that  is  fast 
coming,  if  she  could  generously  have  forgotten  the  crimi 
nality  of  his  attempt  in  its  enormous  folly.  On  the  other 
hand,  any  common-sensible  man,  looking  at  the  matter  un- 
sentimentally,  must  have  felt  a  certain  intellectual  satisfac 
tion  in  seeing  him  hanged,  if  it  were  only  in  requital  of 
his  preposterous  miscalculation  of  possibilities."  Now  that 
the  heat  of  that  great  conflict  has  passed  away,  this  is  a 
capital  expression  of  the  saner  estimate,  in  the  United 
States,  of  the  dauntless  and  deluded  old  man  who  pro 
posed  to  solve  a  complex  political  problem  by  stirring  up 
a  servile  insurrection.  There  is  much  of  the  same  sound 
sense,  interfused  with  light,  just  appreciable  irony,  in  such 
a  passage  as  the  following : 

"  I  tried  to  imagine  how  very  disagreeable  the  presence  of 
a  Southern  army  would  be  in  a  sober  town  of  Massachusetts ; 
and  the  thought  considerably  lessened  my  wonder  at  the  cold 
and  shy  regards  that  are  cast  upon  our  troops,  the  gloom,  the 
sullen  demeanour,  the  declared,  or  scarcely  hidden,  sympathy 
with  rebellion,  which  are  so  frequent  here.  It  is  a,  strange 
thing  in  human  life  that  the  greatest  errors  both  of  men  and 
women  often  spring  from  their  sweetest  and  most  generous 
qualities  ;  and  so,  undoubtedly,  thousands  of  warm-hearted, 
generous,  and  impulsive  persons  have  joined  the  Rebels,  not 
from  any  real  zeal  for  the  cause,  but  because,  between  two 
conflicting  loyalties,  they  chose  that  which  necessarily  lay 
nearest  the  heart.  There  never  existed  any  other  Govern 
ment  against  which  treason  was  so  easy,  and  could  defend  it 
self  by  such  plausible  arguments  as  against  that  of  the  United 


VIL]  LAST  YEARS.  171 

States.  The  anomaly  of  two  allegiances  (of  which  that  of 
the  State  comes  nearest  home  to  a  man's  feeling,  and  in 
cludes  the  altar  and  the  hearth,  while  the  General  Govern 
ment  claims  his  devotion  only  to  an  airy  mode  of  law,  and 
has  no  symbol  but  a  flag)  is  exceedingly  mischievous  in  this 
point  of  view  ;  for  it  has  converted  crowds  of  honest  people 
into  traitors,  who  seem  to  themselves  not  merely  innocent  but 
patriotic,  and  who  die  for  a  bad  cause  with  a  quiet  conscience, 
as  if  it  were  the  best.  In  the  vast  extent  of  our  country — 
too  vast  by  far  to  be  taken  into  one  small  human  heart — we 
inevitably  limit  to  our  own  State,  or  at  farthest,  to  our  own 
little  section,  that  sentiment  of  physical  love  for  the  soil 
which  renders  an  Englishman,  for  example,  so  intensely  sen 
sitive  to  the  dignity  and  well-being  of  his  little  island,  that 
one  hostile  foot,  treading  anywhere  upon  it,  would  make  a 
bruise  on  each  individual  breast.  If  a  man  loves  his  own 
State,  therefore,  and  is  content  to  be  ruined  with  her,  let  us 
shoot  him  if  we  can,  but  allow  him  an  honourable  burial  in 
the  soil  he  fights  for." 

To  this  paragraph  a  line  of  deprecation  from  the  editor 
is  attached ;  and  indeed,  from  the  point  of  view  of  a  vig 
orous  prosecution  of  the  war,  it  was  doubtless  not  particu 
larly  pertinent.  But  it  is  interesting  as  an  example  of  the 
way  an  imaginative  man  judges  current  events — trying  to 
see  the  other  side  as  well  as  his  own,  to  feel  what  his  ad 
versary  feels,  and  present  his  view  of  the  case. 

But  he  had  other  occupations  for  his  imagination  than 
putting  himself  into  the  shoes  of  unappreciative  Southern 
ers.  He  began  at  this  time  two  novels,  neither  of  which 
he  lived  to  finish,  but  both  of  which  were  published,  as 
fragments,  after  his  death.  The  shorter  of  these  frag 
ments,  to  which  he  had  given  the  name  of  The  Dolliver 
Romance,  is  so  very  brief  that  little  can  be  said  of  it.  The 
author  strikes,  with  all  his  usual  sweetness,  the  opening 


172  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

notes  of  a  story  of  New  England  life,  and  the  few  pages 
which  have  been  given  to  the  world  contain  a  charming 
picture  of  an  old  man  and  a  child. 

The  other  rough  sketch  —  it  is  hardly  more  —  is  in  a 
manner  complete ;  it  was  unfortunately  deemed  complete 
enough  to  be  brought  out  in  a  magazine  as  a  serial  novel. 
This  was  to  do  it  a  great  wrong,  and  I  do  not  go  too  far 
in  saying  that  poor  Hawthorne  would  probably  not  have 
enjoyed  the  very  bright  light  that  has  been  projected  upon 
this  essentially  crude  piece  of  work.  I  am  at  a  loss  to 
know  how  to  speak  of  Septimius  Felton,  or  the  Elixir  of 
Life ;  I  have  purposely  reserved  but  a  small  space  for 
doing  so,  for  the  part  of  discretion  seems  to  be  to  pass  it 
by  lightly.  I  differ,  therefore,  widely  from  the  author's 
biographer  and  son-in-law  in  thinking  it  a  work  of  the 
greatest  weight  and  value,  offering  striking  analogies  with 
Goethe's  Faust ;  and  still  more  widely  from  a  critic  whom 
Mr.  Lathrop  quotes,  who  regards  a  certain  portion  of  it  as 
"one  of  the  very  greatest  triumphs  in  all  literature."  It 
seems  to  me  almost  cruel  to  pitch  in  this  exalted  key  one's 
estimate  of  the  rough  first  draught  of  a  tale  in  regard  to 
which  the  author's  premature  death  operates,  virtually,  as 
a  complete  renunciation  of  pretensions.  It  is  plain  to  any 
reader  that  Septimius  Felton,  as  it  stands,  with  its  rough 
ness,  its  gaps,  its  mere  allusiveness  and  slightness  of  treat 
ment,  gives  us  but  a  very  partial  measure  of  Hawthorne's 
full  intention ;  and  it  is  equally  easy  to  believe  that  this 
intention  was  much  finer  than  anything  we  find  in  the 
book.  Even  if  we  possessed  the  novel  in  its  complete 
form,  however,  I  incline  to  think  that  we  should  regard 
it  as  very  much  the  weakest  of  Hawthorne's  productions. 
The  idea  itself  seems  a  failure,  and  the  best  that  might 
have  come  of  it  would  have  been  very  much  below  The 


TIL]  LAST  YEARS.  173 

Scarlet  Letter  or  The  House  of  the  Seven  Gables.  The 
appeal  to  our  interest  is  not  felicitously  made,  and  the 
fancy  of  a  potion,  to  assure  eternity  of  existence,  being 
made  from  the  flowers  which  spring  from  the  grave  of  a 
man  whom  the  distiller  of  the  potion  has  deprived  of  life, 
though  it  might  figure  with  advantage  in  a  short  story  of 
the  pattern  of  the  Twice-Told  Tales,  appears  too  slender 
to  carry  the  weight  of  a  novel.  Indeed,  this  whole  matter 
of  elixirs  and  potions  belongs  to  the  fairy-tale  period  of 
taste,  and  the  idea  of  a  young  man  enabling  himself  to 
live  forever  by  concocting  and  imbibing  a  magic  draught 
has  the  misfortune  of  not  appealing  to  our  sense  of  reality, 
or  even  to  our  sympathy.  The  weakness  of  Septimius 
Felton  is  that  the  reader  cannot  take  the  hero  seriously — 
a  fact  of  which  there  can  be  no  better  proof  than  the  ele 
ment  of  the  ridiculous  which  inevitably  mingles  itself  in 
the  scene  in  which  he  entertains  his  lady-love  with  a  pro 
phetic  sketch  of  his  occupations  during  the  successive 
centuries  of  his  earthly  immortality.  I  suppose  the  an 
swer  to  my  criticism  is,  that  this  is  allegorical,  symbolic, 
ideal ;  but  we  feel  that  it  symbolises  nothing  substantial, 
#nd  that  the  truth — whatever  it  may  be — that  it  illus 
trates  is  as  moonshiny,  to  use  Hawthorne's  own  expres 
sion,  as  the  allegory  itself.  Another  fault  of  the  story  is, 
that  a  great  historical  event — the  war  of  the  Revolution — 
is  introduced  in  the  first  few  pages,  in  order  to  supply  the 
hero  with  a  pretext  for  killing  the  young  man  from  whose 
grave  the  flower  of  immortality  is  to  sprout,  and  then 
drops  out  of  the  narrative  altogether,  not  even  forming  a 
background  to  the  sequel.  It  seems  to  me  that  Haw 
thorne  should  either  have  invented  some  other  occasion 
for  the  death  of  his  young  officer,  or  else,  having  struck 
the  note  of  the  great  public  agitation  which  overhung  his 


174  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

little  group  of  characters,  have  been  careful  to  sound  it 
through  the  rest  of  his  tale.  I  do  wrong,  however,  to  in 
sist  upon  these  things,  for  I  fall  thereby  into  the  error  of 
treating  the  work  as  if  it  had  been  cast  into  its  ultimate 
form  and  acknowledged  by  the  author.  To  avoid  this  er 
ror,  I  shall  make  no  other  criticism  of  details,  but  content 
myself  with  saying  that  the  idea  and  intention  of  the  book 
appear,  relatively  speaking,  feeble,  and  that,  even  had  it 
been  finished,  it  would  have  occupied  a  very  different  place 
in  the  public  esteem  from  the  writer's  masterpieces. 

The  year  1864  brought  with  it  for  Hawthorne  a  sense 
of  weakness  and  depression  from  which  he  had  little  relief 
during  the  four  or  five  months  that  were  left  him  of  life. 
He  had  his  engagement  to  produce  The  Dolliver  Romance, 
which  had  been  promised  to  the  subscribers  of  the  Allan- 
lie  Monthly  (it  was  the  first  time  he  had  undertaken  to 
publish  a  work  of  fiction  in  monthly  parts),  but  he  was 
unable  to  write,  and  his  consciousness  of  an  unperformed 
task  weighed  upon  him,  and  did  little  to  dissipate  his 
physical  inertness.  "  I  have  not  yet  had  courage  to  read 
the  Dolliver  proof-sheet,"  he  wrote  to  his  publisher  in  De 
cember,  1863;  "but  will  set  about  it  soon,  though  with, 
terrible  reluctance,  such  as  I  never  felt  before.  I  am  most 
grateful  to  you,"  he  went  on,  "for  protecting  me  from 
that  visitation  of  the  elephant  and  his  cub.  If  you  hap 
pen  to  see  Mr. ,  of  L ,  a  young  man  who  .was 

here  last  summer,  pray  tell  him  anything  your  conscience 
will  let  you,  to  induce  him  to  spare  me  another  visit,  which 
I  know  he  intended.  I  really  am  not  well,  and  cannot  be 
disturbed  by  strangers,  without  more  suffering  than  it  is 
worth  while  to  endure."  A  month  later  he  was  obliged 
to  ask  for  a  further  postponement.  "  I  am  not  quite  up 
to  writing  yet,  but  shall  make  an  effort  as  soon  as  I  see 


TIL]  LAST  YEARS.  175 

any  hope  of  success.  You  ought  to  be  thankful  that 
(like  most  other  broken-down  authors)  I  do  not  pester 
you  with  decrepit  pages,  and  insist  upon  your  accepting 
them  as  full  of  the  old  spirit  and  vigour.  That  trouble, 
perhaps,  still  awaits  you,  after  I  shall  have  reached  a  fur 
ther  stage  of  decay.  Seriously,  my  mind  has,  for  the  time, 
lost  its  temper  and  its  fine  edge,  and  I  have  an  instinct 
that  I  had  better  keep  quiet.  Perhaps  I  shall  have  a  new 
spirit  of  vigour  if  I  wait  quietly  for  it;  perhaps  not." 
The  winter  passed  away,  but  the  "new  spirit  of  vigour" 
remained  absent ;  and  at  the  end  of  February  he  wrote  to 
Mr.  Fields  that  his  novel  had  simply  broken  down,  and  that 
he  should  never  finish  it.  "  I  hardly  know  what  to  say 
to  the  public  about  this  abortive  romance,  though  I  know 
pretty  well  what  the  case  will  be.  I  shall  never  finish  it. 
Yet  it  is  not  quite  pleasant  for  an  author  to  announce 
himself,  or  to  be  announced,  as  finally  broken  down  as  to 
his  literally  faculty.  ...  I  cannot  finish  it  unless  a  great 
change  comes  over  me ;  and  if  I  make  too  great  an  effort 
to  do  so,  it  will  be  my  death ;  not  that  I  should  care  much 
for  that,  if  I  could  fight  the  battle  through  and  win  it, 
thus  ending  a  life  of  much  smoulder  and  a  scanty  fire  in 
a  blaze  of  glory.  But  I  should  smother  myself  in  mud 
of  my  own  making.  ...  I  am  not  low-spirited,  nor  fanci 
ful,  nor  freakish,  but  look  what  seem  to  me  realities  in 
the  face,  and  am  ready  to  take  whatever  may  come.  If 
I  could  but  go  to  England  now,  I  think  that  the  sea-voy 
age  and  the  *  old  Home '  might  set  me  all  right." 

But  he  was  not  to  go  to  England ;  he  started  three 
months  later  upon  a  briefer  journey,  from  which  he  never 
returned.  His  health  was  seriously  disordered,  and  in 
April,  according  to  a  letter  from  Mrs.  Hawthorne,  printed 
by  Mr.  Fields,  he  had  been  "  miserably  ill."  His  feebleness 


176  HAWTHORNE.  [CHAP. 

was  complete ;  he  appears  to  have  had  no  definite  malady, 
but  he  was,  according  to  the  common  phrase,  failing.  Gen 
eral  Pierce  proposed  to  him  that  they  should  make  a  little 
tour  together  among  the  mountains  of  New  Hampshire, 
and  Hawthorne  consented,  in  the  hope  of  getting  some 
profit  from  the  change  of  air.  The  Northern  New  Eng 
land  spring  is  not  the  most  genial  season  in  the  world, 
and  this  was  an  indifferent  substitute  for  the  resource  for 
which  his  wife  had,  on  his  behalf,  expressed  a  wish  —  a 
visit  to  "  some  island  in  the  Gulf  Stream."  He  was  not 
to  go  far ;  he  only  reached  a  little  place  called  Plymouth, 
one  of  the  stations  of  approach  to  the  beautiful  mountain- 
scenery  of  New  Hampshire,  when,  on  the  18th  of  May, 
1864,  death  overtook  him.  His  companion,  General 
Pierce,  going  into  his  room  in  the  early  morning,  found 
that  he  had  breathed  his  last  during  the  night — had  pass 
ed  away,  tranquilly,  comfortably,  without  a  sign  or  a  sound, 
in  his  sleep.  This  happened  at  the  hotel  of  the  place — 
a  vast  white  edifice  adjacent  to  the  railway  -  station,  and 
entitled  the  Pemigiwasset  House.  He  was  buried  at 
Concord,  and  many  of  the  most  distinguished  men  in  the 
country  stood  by  his  grave. 

He  was  a  beautiful,  natural,  original  genius,  and  his  life 
had  been  singularly  exempt  from  worldly  preoccupations 
and  vulgar  efforts.  It  had  been  as  pure,  as  simple,  as  un 
sophisticated,  as  his  work.  He  had  lived  primarily  in  his 
domestic  affections,  which  were  of  the  tenderest  kind ;  and 
then  —  without  eagerness,  without  pretension,  but  with  a 
great  deal  of  quiet  devotion — in  his  charming  art.  His 
work  will  remain ;  it  is  too  original  and  exquisite  to  pass 
away ;  among  the  men  of  imagination  he  will  always  have 
his  niche.  No  one  has  had  just  that  vision  of  life,  and  no 
one  has  had  a  literary  form  that  more  successfully  express- 


VIL]  LAST  YEARS.  177 

ed  his  vision.  He  was  not  a  moralist,  and  be  was  not  sim 
ply  a  poet.  The  moralists  are  weightier,  denser,  richer,  in 
a  sense ;  the  poets  are  more  purely  inconclusive  and  irre 
sponsible.  He  combined  in  a  singular  degree  the  spon 
taneity  of  the  imagination  with  a  haunting  care  for  moral 
problems.  Man's  conscience  was  his  theme,  but  he  saw 
it  in  the  light  of  a  creative  fancy  which  added,  out  of  its 
own  substance,  an  interest,  and,  I  may  almost  say,  an  im 
portance. 


THE    END. 


ENGLISH  MEN  OF  LETTERS. 

EDITED  BY  JOHN  MORLEY. 


These  short  Books  are  addressed  to  the  general  public,  with  a  view  both 
to  stirring  arid  satisfying  au  interest  in  literature  and  its  great  topics  in  the 
minds  of  those  who  have  to  run  as  they  read.  An  immense  class  is  growing 
up,  and  must  every  year  increase,  whose  education  will  have  made  them 
ajive  to  the  importance  of  the  masters  of  our  literature,  and  capable  of  in 
telligent  curiosity  as  to  their  performances.  The  series  is  intended  to  give 
the  means  of  nourishing  this  curiosity  to  an  extent  that  shall  be  copious 
enough  to  be  profitable  for  knowledge  and  life,  and  yet  be  brief  enough  to 
serve  those  whose  leisure  is  scanty.  The  following  volumes  are  now  ready: 

JOHNSON LESLIE  STEPHEN. 

GIBBON J.  C.  MORISON. 

SCOTT R.  H.  HUTTON. 

SHELLEY. J.  A.  SVMONDS. 

HUME Professor  HUXLKY. 

GOLDSMITH WILLIAM  BLACK. 

DEFOE WILLIAM  MINTO. 

BURNS Principal  SIIAIEP. 

SPENSER The  DEAN  OF  ST.  PAUL'S. 

THACKERAY ANTHONY  TKOLLOPE. 

BURKE JOHN  MOELE Y. 

MILTON MAEK  PATTISON. 

12mo,  Cloth,  75  cents  a  volume. 


HAWTHORNE.    By  HENKY  JAMES,  Jr 12mo,  Cloth,  $1  00. 


VOLUMES  IN  PREPARATION: 

SOUTHEY Professor  DOWDEN. 

CHAUCER Professor  A.  W.  WARD. 

BUNYAN J.  A.  FBOUDE. 

WORDSWORTH F.  MYEIC. 

SWIFT JOHN  MOELEY. 

BYRON Professor  NIOUOL. 

GRAY JOHN  MORLEY. 

ADAM  SMITH LEONAEI>  H.  COURTNEY. 

COWPER GOLDWIN  SMITH. 

POPE LESLIE  STEPHEN. 

L ANDOR ." Professor  SIDNEY  COLVIN. 

BENTLEY Professor  JEHU. 

Others  will  be  announced. 


PUBLISHED  BY  HARPER  &  BROTHERS,  NEW  YORK. 


BY  GEORGE  WILLIAM  CURTIS. 


LOTUS -EATING.     A  Summer  Book.     Illustrated  from  Designs 
by  Kensett.     12mo,  Cloth,  $1  50. 

This  delightful  volume  is  a  record  of  summer  rambles,  touching  gracefully 
on  many  of  the  most  interesting  spots  in  American  scenery,  and  giving  a 
series  of  lively  pictures  of  the  celebrated  places  of  fashionable  resort. 

PRUE  AND  I.      12mo,  Cloth,  $1  50. 

In  the  character  and  fancies  of  an  old  book-keeper,  the  author  of  these 
charming  essays  has  embodied  the  sweetest  and  most  genial  humor  which 
has  graced  English  literature  since  the  delightful  Essays  of  Elia. 

NILE  NOTES  OF  A  HOWADJI.      12mo,  Cloth,  $1  50. 

The  author  takes  the  reader  with  him  into  rare  and  beautiful  scenes  of 
nature,  unfolds  the  mysteries  of  Arabian  life,  and  reproduces  the  strange 
incidents  of  a  unique  tour  in  language  of  wonderful  vividness  and  force. 

THE  HOWADJI  IN  SYRIA.     12mo,  Cloth,  $1  50. 

It  abounds  in  picturesque  descriptions  of  the  marvels  of  the  Holy  Land, 
throwing  fresh  light  on  ancient  localities,  and  imbued  with  the  spirit  of 
sympathy  and  reverence  for  the  sacred  scenes  which  it  calls  forth  from  the 
dim  oblivion  of  the  past. 

THE    POTIPHAR    PAPERS.      Illustrated  by   Drawings  from 
Hoppin.     12mo,  Cloth,  $1  50. 

As  graphic  and  telling  descriptions  of  a  peculiar  phase  of  American  so 
ciety,  they  are  unexcelled ;  the  fresh  and  sparkling  wit,  the  genial  humor, 
and  keen  and  truthful  satire  with  which  "Our  Best  Society"  is  dissected, 
have  delighted  thousands,  and  made  "  Mrs.  Potiphar  "  a  proverb. 

TRUMPS.      A   Novel.      Illustrated   by    Hoppin.      12mo,  Cloth, 

$2  00. 

Gay  and  sparkling  in  its  external  aspect,  the  novel  is  evidently  the  fruit 
of  profound  insight  and  conscientious  adherence  to  the  truth  of  nature,  as 
well  as  of  acute  observation  and  a  spontaneous  liveliness  of  humor.  The 
materials  are  drawn  from  the  many-colored  exhibitions  of  fashionable  and 
commercial  life  in  New  York ;  and  they  are  wrought  up  into  a  cabinet  of 
portraitures  which  vividly  reflect  the  familiar  traits  of  the  original. 


Published  by  HARPER  &  BROTHERS,  New  York. 

jg®"  A  ny  of  the  above  works  sent  by  mail,  postage  prepaid,  to  any  part  of 
tlie  United  States,  on  receipt  of  the  price. 


OLIVER  GOLDSMITH, 


POETICAL   WORKS  OF   OLIVER   GOLDSMITH. 

With  a  Biographical  Memoir,  and  Notes  on  the  Poems.  Edited 
by  BOLTON  CORNET.  Illustrated.  8vo,  Cloth,  $3  00 ;  Cloth,  Gilt 
Edges,  $3  75 ;  Turkey  Morocco,  Gilt  Edges,  $7  50. 

SELECT   POEMS   OF   OLIVER  GOLDSMITH. 

Edited,  with  Notes,  by  WILLIAM  J.  ROLFE,  A.M.  Illustrated. 
Small  4to,  Flexible  Cloth,  70  cents ;  Paper,  50  cents. 

GOLDSMITH'S  POEMS. 

32mo,  Paper,  25  cents ;   Cloth,  40  cents. 

GOLDSMITH'S  PLAYS. 

32mo,  Paper,  20  cents  ;   Cloth,  35  cents. 

THE  VICAR   OF  WAKEFIELD. 

By  OLIVER  GOLDSMITH.  ISrno,  Cloth,  50  cents.  32mo,  Paper, 
25  cents ;  Cloth,  40  cents. 

GOLDSMITH.     By  WILLIAM  BLACK. 

Goldsmith.  By  WILLIAM  BLACK.  A  Critical  and  Biographical 
Sketch.  (In  the  series  entitled  "English  Men  of  Letters.") 
12mo,  Cloth,  75  cents. 

GOLDSMITH.— BUNYAN.— MADAME  D'ARBLAY. 

By  LORD  MACAULAY.     32mo,  Paper,  25  cents ;   Cloth,  40  cents. 

HISTORY  OF  GREECE. 

By  OLIVER  GOLDSMITH.  Abridged  by  the  Author.  18mo,  Cloth, 
75  cents. 

HISTORY   OF  ROME. 

By  OLIVER  GOLDSMITH.  Abridged  by  the  Author.  18mo,  Cloth. 
75  cents. 

OLIVER   GOLDSMITH.     By  WASHINGTON  IRVING. 

Life  of  Oliver  Goldsmith.  With  Selections  from  his  Writings. 
By  WASHINGTON  IRVING.  2  vols.,  18mo,  Cloth,  $1  50. 


Published  by  EARPEE  &  BEOTEEES,  New  York. 

Any  of  the  above  works  will  be  sent  by  mail,  postage  prepaid,  to  any  part 
of  the  United  States,  on  receipt  of  tlie  price. 


SAMUEL  JOHNSON. 


BOSWELL'S  JOHNSON. 

The  Life  of  Samuel  Johnson,  LL.D.  Including  a  Journal  of  a 
Tour  to  the  Hebrides.  By  JAMES  BdswELL,  Esq.  Portrait  of 
Boswell.  2  vols.,  8vo,  Cloth,  $4  00;  Sheep,  $5  00;  Half  Calf, 

$8  50. 

JOHNSON'S  WORKS. 

The  Complete  Works  of  Samuel  Johnson,  LL.D.  With  an  Essay 
on  his  Life  and  Genius,  by  ARTHUR  MURPHY,  Esq.  2  vols.,  8vo, 
Cloth,  $4  00 ;  Sheep,  $5  00 ;  Half  Calf,  $8  50. 

SAMUEL  JOHNSON.    By  LESLIE  STEPHEN. 

Samuel  Johnson.  By  LESLIE  STEPHEN.  A  Critical  and  Biographi 
cal  Sketch.  (In  the  series  entitled  "  English  Men  of  Letters.") 
12mo,  Cloth,  75  cents. 

JOHNSON'S  LIFE  AND  WRITINGS. 

Selected  and  Arranged  by  the  Rev.  WILLIAM  P.  PAGE.  2  vols., 
18mo,  Cloth,  $1  50. 

JOHNSON.    By  Lord  MACAULAY. 

Samuel  Johnson,  LL.D.  By  Lord  MACAULAY.  32mo,  Paper, 
25  cents. 

JOHNSON'S  RELIGIOUS  LIFE. 

The  Religious  Life  and  Death  of  Dr.  Johnson.     12mo,  Cloth, 

$1  50. 

SAMUEL  JOHNSON.    By  E.  T.  MASON. 

Samuel  Johnson :  His  Words  and  his  Ways  ;  What  he  Said, 
What  he  Did,  and  What  Men  Thought  and  Spoke  Concerning 
Him.  Edited  by  E.  T.  MASON.  12mo,  Cloth,  $1  50. 


Published  by  HAEPEE  &  BEOTEEES,  Hew  York, 

ny  of  the  above  works  will  be  sent  by  mail,  postage  prepaid,  to  any  part 
Of  the  United  States,  on  receipt  of  the  price. 


A  NEW  LIBRARY  EDITION 

OF 

MACAULAY'S  ENGLAND. 

MACATJLAY'S  HISTORY  OF  ENGLAND.  New  Edi 
tion,  from  New  Electrotype  Plates.  5  volumes,  8vo, 
Cloth  with  Paper  Labels,  Gilt  Tops  and  Uncut  Edges, 
$10  00.  Sold  only  in  Sets. 

The  beauty  of  the  edition  is  the  beauty  of  proper  workmanship 
and  solid  worth — the  beauty  of  fitness  alone.  Nowhere  is  the  least 
effort  made  to  decorate  the  volumes  externally  or  internally.  They 
are  perfectly  printed  from  new  plates  that  have  been  made  in  the 
best  manner,  and  with  the  most  accurate  understanding  of  what  is 
needed ;  and  they  are  solidly  bound,  with  absolutely  plain  black 
cloth  covers,  without  relief  of  any  kind,  except  such  as  is  afforded 
by  the  paper  label.  It  is  a  set  of  plain,  solid,  sensible  volumes, 
made  for  use,  and  so  made  as  to  be  comfortable  in  the  using. — 
N.  Y.  Evening  Post. 

OTHER  EDITIONS  OF  MACAULAY'S  ENGLAND: 

LIBRARY  EDITION:   5  vols.,  8vo,  ClotL,  $10  00. 
POPULAR  EDITION:   5  vols.,  12mo,  ClotL,  $4  00. 
CHEAP  EDITION  :   5  vols.,  8vo,  Paper,  $1  50. 

The  volumes  are  sold  separately. 
Published  by  HAEPEE  &  BKOTHEKS,  New  York. 

Sent  by  mail,  postage  prepaid,  to  any  part  of  the  United  States, 
on  receipt  of  the  price. 


MOTLEY'S  HISTORIES. 

CHEAP    EDITION. 

THE  RISE  OF  THE  DUTCH  REPUBLIC.  A  History.  By  JOHN 
LOTHROP  MOTLEY,  LL.D.,  D.C.L.  With  a  Portrait  of  William  of 
Orange.  3  volumes,  §vo,  Cloth  with  Paper  Labels,  Uncut  Edges 
and  Gilt  Tops,  $6  00.  Sold  only  in  Sets. 

HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  NETHERLANDS:  from  the  Death 
of  William  the  Silent  to  the  Twelve-Years'  Truce.  With  a  full 
View  of  the  English-Dutch  Struggle  against  Spain,  and  of  the 
Origin  and  Destruction  of  the  Spanish  Armada.  By  JOHN 
LOTHROP  MOTLEY,  LL.D.,  D.C.L.  With  Portraits.  4  volumes, 
8vo,  Cloth  with  Paper  Labels,  Uncut  Edges  and  Gilt  Tops,  $8  00. 
Sold  only  in  Sets. 

LIFE  AND  DEATH  OF  JOHN  OF  BARNEVELD,  Advocate  of 
Holland.  With  a  View  of  the  Primary  Causes  and  Movements 
of  the  "  Thirty- Years'  War."  By  JOHN  LOTHROP  MOTLEY,  LL.D., 
D.C.L.  Illustrated.  2  volumes,  8vo,  Cloth  with  Paper  Labels, 
Uncut  Edges  and  Gilt  Tops,  $4  00.  Sold  only  in  Sets. 


This  edition  of  Motley's  "Complete  Historical  Works"  affords  an  oppor 
tunity  to  the  collector  of  choice  standard  works  to  fill  a  possible  vacancy  in 
his  library  at  a  moderate  cost.  The  reader  of  Motley  always  returns  to  the 
perusal  of  his  writings  with  a  zest  which  may  be  compared  to  the  taste  of 
the  ripe  strawberries  in  early  June.  The  freshness  of  his  mind  never  fails 
to  give  a  flavor  to  his  narrative.  His  descriptions  read  less  like  a  recital  of 
the  faded  past  than  a  vivid  picture  of  living  scenes.  No  historian  transports 
BO  much  of  himself  into  his  writings ;  and  though  without  the  faintest  trace 
of  egotism,  they  are  always  intensely  human  and  individual.— N.  Y.  Tribune. 

The  original  Library  Edition,  on  larger  paper,  of  Mr.  Motley's 
Histories  can  still  be  supplied :  "  The  Dutch  Republic,"  3  vols. ; 
"  The  History  of  the  United  Netherlands,"  4  vols. ;  "  Life  and  Death 
of  John  of  Barneveld,"  2  vols.  Price  per  volume,  in  Cloth,  $3  50 ; 
in  Sheep,  $4  00 ;  in  Half  Calf  or  Half  Morocco,  $5  75.  The  volumes 
of  this  original  edition  sold  separately. 

Published  by  EAEPEE  &  BEOTEEES,  New  York. 

Sent  by  mail,  postage  prepaid,  to  any  part  of  the  United  States, 
on  receipt  of  the  price. 


PS 


